Workouts

Posted on by Jordan

Subtitle: Yes we still do them!

The addition of Hannah into our lives has…. complicated getting work outs in, but Heather and I have managed to sneak in at least a little exercise despite the rather demanding schedule imposed by an infant.

Heather continues to take advantage of the treadmill in our building. I won’t say much beyond that it’s what she has been doing for a long time and covers all the bases of being enjoyable, effective stress control, and producing results.

Last winter I tried using the elliptical trainer as a way to be nicer to my knees. I never felt like I was able to challenge myself enough, and I really don’t like staring into a TV during my workout. I decided to try a more strength training oriented approach this winter. Pre-Hannah I was just doing kind of a random collection of body-weight lifts, and the occasional free-weight session. It worked ok, but I would not consider it a great success.

After the initial craziness of Hannah’s arrival I wanted to take a more structured, and hopefully efficient approach, primarily using the book “You Are Your Own Gym.” I am now a couple of months into the “basic” program, and fairly happy with it. I can’t say that I have really lost weight, but I have gotten stronger, and considering how tricky it is to sneak in workouts some days I will have to be happy with that for now.

Someday it will warm up (not today, May second and it’s been snowing for 14 solid hours!)  and I will incorporate running again, but I do think it’s noteworthy that I am over two months into a challenging workout program and haven’t had to skip a single day for knee problems or other injuries. I haven’t ever had that kind of consistency with running.

I have been really impressed that using minimal equipment, just a big dowel to place across a doorway or span over two stools and lots of different body weight lifts (think push-ups) even two months in I am still finding the workouts challenging! The downside is I probably need a pull-up bar at some point, and I have needed to adjust the occasional workout to remove jumping oriented lifts. Someday we won’t live on the 3rd floor and I can re-introduce those 🙂

-Jordan

Finished Reading: “The Medieval Machine”

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I spend the weekend entertaining some friends from Kansas City.

We had a great time, but the combination of gloomy fall weather and a general goal of taking it easy meant there aren’t really any stories to tell, nor are there any interesting pictures.

This gives me a great opportunity to lay out a few of my thoughts after reading The Medieval Machine.

It was a pleasant surprise to find how much I learned from this book. Often I find nonfiction a little harder to read. (have I ever mentioned my every-other rotation goal of fiction/nonfiction? It’s been tougher to maintain than I had hoped.) Having established that I enjoyed learning, I really wanted to argue with the author at every turn about his conclusions and implications.

I suppose a quick summary might be helpful. The book covers the major mechanization of the middle ages (also sometimes called the dark ages). As it turns out, that period was full of advancement and progress, mostly around water and wind power. Access to non-manual forms of energy are easy to take for granted, and the book was eye-opening as it described all the tasks powered by falling water, grinding wheat, crushing ore, and conditioning fabrics, to name a few.

Another aspect that quickly became apparent is how much freedom I take for granted. The book was full of examples where the person who built a new mill was able to force everyone in the region to use it. This compulsion went so far in one case that the local governor sent troops door-to-door confiscating hand mills by sword point, leaving the peasants no way to grind flour except to use the governor’s new mill.

My frustration with the author started in the introduction where he stated with great confidence that there were no innovations left to be had that could significantly impact the course of human progress, and we were doomed to a slow decline… so stated in the year 1970. I may have been so put off by the introduction that I imagined most of my remaining gripes, but I couldn’t help but feel like the author wasn’t sure everything he was describing was actually a good thing. As if he felt that saving millions of man hours grinding wheat was somehow a loss.

In the end, the book made me spend a lot of time thinking. Thinking about the massive wealth of infrastructure we have, thinking about the impact of virtually unlimited access to information regarding nearly anything, and just marveling at how we got here from there.

Given the amount of thought and reflection it generated I find myself willing to forgive most of my gripes and say the book was a good read… although not one I am likely to read again.

-Jordan

Chasing The Dragon — Book

Posted on by Jordan

So before I talk about the book, I have to admit that I remember posting here that I was going to try and do little summary / reviews of books once I finished reading them.

I failed at that plan. There have been a number of things I have read that never made it onto the blog.

Non the less, I finished reading Chasing The Dragon by Jackie Pullenger, and wanted to talk about it here.

I really enjoyed the book! It wasn’t always the most enjoyable read, because the situations she describes are horrifying in many cases. At the same time that was what made the book so exciting to read, was hearing her describe how God was working.

From a practical standpoint, it made it a lot harder to feel sorry for myself about having to sometimes cook food for a bunch of kids at church. I spent a lot of time reflecting on my worldview and relative situation while reading the book, something I don’t typically do… I don’t want to wander too far down that rabbit trail, except to say that it was kind of refreshing.

Going back to the book, it deals with drug addicts within the Walled-City of Hong Kong. It does not in any way sound like a place I would want to be… I find down town Des Moines far too crowded for my tastes. About the time I was finishing the book, a blog I follow had a few Walled-City related items that I found rather interesting.

The first is an old German TV documentary. I will let the linked details fill you in, except to say that most of the commentary that goes with the video is pretty sensationalized, at best, and often directly contradicts situations described in the book. Primarily the idea that “there is no law” because roughly 20% of the book was a Jackie dealing with police and the court system, as they related to people inside the Walled-City.

The Documentary (via io9)

The other item, also Via io9 is a few pictures, and then some sort of informational / layout drawings. They aren’t quite as interesting as the video, but worth linking I suppose.

The drawings

So to sum this up, if you haven’t read Chasing The Dragon, and are looking to pickup some nonfiction (something I always think I should be doing more) you should check it out! 🙂

-Jordan

Book Reviews

Posted on by Jordan

As I mentioned in the vacation summary post, I read quite a few books that week.

I thought I could throw up some quick thoughts about them here.

The Lost Fleet Series:

The basic hook in these books remains the complications of communication over solar system sized distances, given the painfully slow speed of light. The rest of the story was ok, but probably wouldn’t have held my attention. It helps that the books are an easy read, of the six books in this saga, I read two of them in a single day (one day per book). Strong points of these books: deals with religion without being disrespectful. The author did invent a faith that is very much not along the lines of Judeo–Christian, but sci-fi books gain points with me just for treating faith with some respect. Another strong point is the author keeping the book inside a PG-13 rating. Some of the other books didn’t and I just don’t see a reason for that. In short, the books are a fun read, but nothing too deep.

The Millionaire Next Door:

This book was amazing! I plan to devote an entire post to it later. The quick summary: “If you want to get excited about saving and living a thrifty lifestyle, read this book!” The book is mostly just detailing things the authors have discovered from years of doing marketing research, but I found it really really interesting, and motivating.

Altered Carbon:

The book boils down to a kind of private-eye story, that incorporates a lot of “way out there” science fiction elements. The story had lots of conspiracy, and suspense… kept me pushing to finish for sure. I keep trying to cut the author some slack for just wanting to have a conflict between religion, and tradition against technology, but I felt like the book really beat up on the Catholic faith more than necessary. I know that the kinds of things they were doing in the book would cause some real conflicts for people and churches, namely the ability to move your contentiousness to another body, more or less at-will. It made for an interesting problem to wrestle with, but given how many other things were made up, I don’t see the point in calling out an existing church. That wasn’t a major element of the book it just annoyed me. I should also include a warning that the language is course, and the book includes both sex and torture scenes that were a little more graphic than I prefer to read. Despite all my complaints, I do plan to pick up the sequel to this eventually.

Black Hawk Down:

The book on which the movie is based. As you might expect, it goes into much more detail about the battle depicted in the movie. I was really shocked at how inexperienced the Rangers were in this book. A year or so ago, I read the book “The Unforgiving Minute” that goes into detail about one man’s path through West Point, Ranger school and then on to Afghanistan. What that book tried to explain, and Black Hawk Down did a better job of explaining, is that, as hard and good as the training provided to the army’s best is, nothing actually prepares you to get shot at. We now have 50 years of practice training special forces, and it still hasn’t changed the fact that “green” troops are going to make a lot of mistakes in their first battle.

The second thing that really stood out to me in the book is how vastly different the culture of Somalia is from ours. The book is full of examples of women and children gladly acting as shields for the tribal fighters. Pregnant women running through gunfire to bring more ammo up to the fighters in cover. Frankly the behavior seemed more alien than some of the stuff I was reading in my sci-fi books. I haven’t nailed down what I think about that, or how a we deal with that without going places nobody wants to be… I probably won’t write whatever conclusions I come up with here…

I thought it was a great book, and I guess I would say if you could handle the violence levels in the movie, and you want to spend some time thinking about the actual conflict, you should check it out.

-Jordan

Shipping Woe

Posted on by Jordan

I had grand aims of pulling together a wedding anniversary one-year retrospective recap thing, but I just cannot begin to think how I would pull that together. Even if I did it would be a massive post, and really I try to avoid painfully verbose posts.

Instead I will tell you about the misadventures I had getting some items here from Amazon.

The catalyst for this was, interestingly  enough, my reflection on the year past and the upcoming year. Heather and I received several copies of the book The Five Love Languages during our engagement and as wedding gifts. We read it eagerly, and I think it was helpful then, but I thought it would be an interesting thing to re-read now that we have a tiny bit of perspective on marriage. Not surprisingly, after two  moves, we couldn’t locate the one copy of the book we had retained from before. I then jumped on Amazon to order a new one, because I felt I had fully torn the apartment up and clearly the book had been lost.

At this point, three things happened.

  1. Heather also bought a copy, because I was halfway wanting this to be a surprise and hadn’t told her about the order
  2. I found our copy of the book
  3. The Amazon shipment was listed by the USPS (United States Postal Service) as “delivered” on their website, but was not in my mailbox.

I should point out that the mailboxes at our current apartment are fairly large as far as apartment mailboxes go, and open with a key. I am fairly confident that the Amazon box would have fit into our mailbox. Even if it had not, there is a large drop box area with a single-use key system that allows the carrier to secure a larger box, and leave the key locked in your mailbox.

I filled out a missing parcel form on the USPS website a day or so later. After three or four days, I started to think maybe that wasn’t going to get any traction. I thought I should contact Amazon, as maybe they could demand a little more attention from the Post Office. I sent an e-mail to Amazon, explaining the missing package, and that I was still waiting to hear from the Post Office. I should point out I did not in any way imply they were to blame, nor that I expected them to do anything, just that I wanted them to be aware of the situation.

I got an e-mail back from an Amazon representative within ten minutes! The e-mail stated that they were sorry the package had been lost and they would be happy to ether re-ship the package or refund my order, and they would do so as soon as I responded to their e-mail.

I replied that I would like to have them re-ship the order (I had several books in addition to the now duplicate Five Love Languages).

The Amazon representative then communicated that they would be unable to re-ship the Five Love Languages as they were sold out, I would be refunded the price of that book and my other books would be shipped over-night express for no charge. The order would have been shipped express even if they had been able to ship all the books.

The next day, UPS dropped of my order, several hours after I got the call from the UPS guy using the entry way system to our apartment, I finally got a response from the USPS regarding my missing parcel. To their credit, they actually sent out a postmaster to check the “large package drop box” and area around the mailbox before responding to me. All the same, I have to point out the incredible speed Amazon had compared to their process.

The end result of the USPS investigation was that the parcel was lost. The recommended I fill out another form on their website for “stolen mail.” I filled out the form just to try and keep their attention on the issue. I don’t know if a package being shipped to the wrong person and them not sending it back is really theft, but frankly the frequency with with which we get mail in our box that clearly has someone else s name and address on it makes me willing to pursue any option I have to try and steer attention to our local mail system.

Three to four days later I got an e-mail saying my report had been processed and would be used for statistical reporting by the USPS. As far as I can tell, they consider the mater closed.

I almost feel obligated to write this post simply to thank Amazon. I never intended to ask them to eat the cost of the lost items, and am amazed that they would do so without hesitation.

-Jordan

Yet Another Video Link

Posted on by Jordan

I feel bad posing another random video, but there hasn’t been much going on as of late.

anyway, the video: Crazy things done on a bike.

Also,  I have been thinking of cataloging books here, it might be interesting to look back on. so I will give it a shot here I guess:

Finished this month:  “Dauntless” (the lost fleet, book 1) and “Zoe’s Tail”

Started: “Atlas Shrugged”

I am strongly tempted to try and post mini reviews of each finished book, but I think I will skip that for now. I should say that I rather liked Dauntless, and am really looking forward to working my way through the rest of the books in the story sometime soon.

-Jordan

Moving Day Is Here! ( Give Or Take 12 Hours)

Posted on by Jordan

The day to move over to the apartment Heather lives in is basically here! Its exciting, but sad because as soon as I get moved, Heather will head to Blair.

I got a birthday card in the mail at Heather’s, from my grandparents. It was nice to get the card, and really drove home the idea that I was moving last night when Heather showed it to me. I still haven’t tackled updating all my contact information for different accounts that need changed in order to continue to get statements etc. I can’t say as I am looking forward to that.

Moving tomorrow shouldn’t be too bad, as I don’t have that much stuff to move… Or thats what I have been telling myself for weeks now, ask me again in a few days, I may have changed my story. I have cheated a little by moving about 50 pounds of books and a few other items over during the week. The plan was to move probably twice that much stuff before now, but its still a head start.

Also, I turn 27 tomorrow, should be a fun day 🙂

-Jordan