Sunday Cardio

The RND program, recently improved, called for 35 minutes of cardio,. It was a nice day so I decided to run. Running means 35 mins / 5.25 mins per KM which is a target of 6.5KM. I ended up running to the Thames and pushed further to 7KM at a 4.55 mins per KM pace.

To update yesterday, the dog needs to get in shape too and I took her on an extreme walk (17KM). My Garmin showed about 1200 calories burned, which I don’t exactly believe – but it was a good four hours from Earl’s Court to Battersea Park to Whitehall up through St. James Park, Kensington Gardens and finally Holland Park.

Extreme Dog Walking

Walked the mutt 17KM today. That’s my exercise.

=RND() Continued

I get to mid-day today (Friday) and I am banged up. My legs are sore from my workout with Richard the Mad Ironman trainer, my neck hurts from the pullup disaster and I am just not into it. I thought ‘day off!’ for sure. But the purpose of Random Exercise is to not follow the mind’s curveballs but randomly exercise at a steady pace.

So I fired up my spreadsheet and kicked a program on. Here was what it generated and here is what I did:

-15 minutes cardio warmup
-11 x Walking Lunges
-10 x Walking Lunges
-15 x Squats
-3 x Handstand Pushups (good progress on these)
-16 x Pushups
-10 x Squat Thrusts
-17 x Tri-dips
-21 x Situps – feet on floor
-6 x Walking Lunges
-11 x Situps – legs elevated
-19 x Situps – feet on floor
-4 x Handstand pushup
-14 x Pushups
-20 x Squats
-21 x Pushups
-17 x Situps – feet on floor
-16 x Situps – feet on floor
-16 x Tridips

The pushups are getting much easier. Past the 15 minutes for the cardio warmup the exercise portion took about 20 minutes. 271 reps of various exercises in 20 minutes. Heart rate up pretty good. Felt good afterward, so the principle of the =RND() exercise works for today.

50 X 50

I made the ridiculous goal of doing 50 pullups (Kipping Style of Crossfit) on my 50th birthday, which gives me many (many, many, many..) years of working up to 50 and keeping in shape for the 50th. I think my morale will be salved at turning 50 by being able to knock out the pullups.

So I go to the gym yesterday for a 1 hour spin and afterwards thought to knock out a couple pullups to start the program. I did exactly ZERO pullups. Trying to do three sets of 5 each negatives (ie leg myself up and lower myself slowly) I over exerted, crimped my neck and slunk from the place beaten and bowed.

50 x 50, baby.

=RND()

As a departure from the knavery, I blog on for the sheer futility of it.

For those of you who know me I can get on a far side of obsessed and my physical training regime this year is now in loony land.

My lovely doe eyed bride bought me  for Christ’s December retail extravaganza ten personal training sessions with ultra-iron man Richard Hume. Rich, an unassuming and classic British person of poshness will basically swim, bike and run…forever. His next feat is to row a small boat across the Atlantic. That’s my personal trainer.

Not wanting to let it rest at that, I took a tip from college classmate and fitness buff Rob Dowse about Crossfit, then started researching different systems until I just decided to randomize my training. Thus =RND().

So I created a spreadsheet to randomize my workouts and here was what I did today:

15 minutes of Cardio warmup (jump jacks, run in place, etc)

Handstand pushup X 4

Squat Thrust X 6

Situps, Feet on Floor X 13

Lunges X 7

Hanstand pushup X 4

Squat Thrust X 6

Squats X 11

Lunges X 7

Handstand Pushups X 4

Situps – Lets off Ground X 14

Squat Thrusts X 9

Lunges X 6

Lunges X 11

Squat Thrusts X 10

Squats X 14

Handstand Pushup X 3

Ran 5.13KM at 4.47 per KM pace.

Was a nice workout and completely random. 1.1 Level of fitness.

A Material Crisis

Former Baghdad dwelling roommate writes:

I’m in the US. I finished the deployment.

 Currently London dwelling fatcat writes:

Congratulations on getting home safe and sound. When you want to exploit your experiences with book rights and movie deals it is helpful to survive.

Above the glass ceiling we think about the impact of our actions in a 360 degree sphere of value creation. We have good court sense, understanding the full impact of our action vectors. As such, I wonder if you have fully considered the impact of your finished deployment on my ability to blog. I don’t think you have.

To keep the vitality of the writing project alive I think we should find some additional places you can travel and get in harms way. If I could suggest you become a kindergarten cop or a school hall monitor. Those little monsters can provide great material. Maybe you could be a taser test subject, or a hybrid car crash test dummy.

There’s no YOU in team and I hope once you have had a chance to relax and readjust to civilization you’ll once again embrace the fantastic opportunity to create material that you putting yourself in harms way affords us both.

Dwell the Rubbishmonger

Dear Dwell Webmaster,

I purchased the Stained oak veneer, mirrored glass · Dimensions : h156cm : w92cm : d45cm : table h77cm” Loop Leg Dressing Table Darkwood with two drawers and mirror (product 101590) for £145.00 and took delivery in my home in London. Dwell as an order and delivery system worked sufficiently. As for the end product, it was rubbish.

I have assembled many flatpack legoland wonders so I am accustomed to all manner of these objects as they arrive in their cardboard shipping boxes and sticky tape fastenings. This one is a particularly bad example of what can go wrong with these products.  You should send a stiff note to your product buyer, and they can send an edict of displeasure on to the Malaysian slave labour camp they use to create these lousy fiberboard furniture approximations. Perhaps you can instruct the inmates on the power of product quality by cutting their rations to half a bowl of gruel a day.

The instructions included were a half a page of wrinkled paper showing a fully assembled loop leg dressing table (darkwood) with a kaleidoscope of arrows that looked more like a two year old’s scribble than any meaningful instruction meant for human use. The fastening objects depicted were indistinguishable from each other. It was more useful to look at the picture on the box than the instructions. People who create drawings like this are usually locked in padded rooms. There was no meaningful sequence to follow, no explanation of the ‘twisty lock’ technical marvel that holds it together. Fortunately I have encountered the twisty lock before. I imagine you have had other complaints because your website has an explanatory paragraph on the twisty lock.

The insstructions have a nice line in para 9: “Follow the instructions carefully and don’t rush. Take a break when feeling tired.” That means you must at some level understand that building this fibreboard concoction will take so long we should plan for naps when exhausted. No doubt you call that messaging consumer relationship value add. Nice work.

The piece itself is of such dimensions that it requires the assembler to have non standard tools. Specifically, the space age twisty locks are inside the drawer assembly where there is 4 inches of clearance. A standard screwdriver is 6.5 inches long. So when you buy this Dwell.com marvel, you have to also buy a shortened 3” screwdriver or you cannot assemble it. That means the actual price is £151.99 plus labour to acquire the special screwdriver. Interestingly, the ‘tools required’ shown on the useless instructions include a poor rendition of a standard screwdriver. Additionally, the holes were not properly drilled. It looked like the drill machine was set incorrectly because on one piece where the holes should have been there were only indentations. I had to redrill the holes myself. When I saw the fine handiwork you sell beneath the Dwell brand, I thought that for you, those indentations were not failures, but statements of Dwell QUALITY.

Why do I care so much about a flatpack fibreboard dressing table with ill conceived documentation delivered undrilled and made so difficult to assemble I should take breaks between sessions? I don’t. Its just another highly branded, cheaply made, globally shipped, overpriced piece of ‘product’ that has the cultural staying power of a Burger King anything but beef frozen patty served at the drive thru window at Home Depot’s joint venture with Walmart – WalBurgerDepot. Why should you care? You might not. But a product sold under your brand had the quality of a trailer park credenza and if you are happy with it, I guess we should be too.

Guards & Prisoners

From a friend:

Where is the blog? Haven’t seen an update in a while….

Lafo responds:

Oh, apologies for not stopping my life to crack a joke or two to lighten your day, Mr. Real Estate Man. Hey, haven’t seen any new buildings being built in your neighborhood. Why have you been slacking off? How does some of that sugar feel spread on your bagel? Mr. Let’s Use Peer Pressure to Elevate Our Friend’s Performance.

So now we WATCH each other to ensure we’re up to some concept of productivity levels?  What kind of communist manifestation am I seeing here? You count my posts per week now and send me a reminder to pick up the pace now. Mr. Report My Buddies Low Productivity to Authorities.  

Its an electronic version of the guards and prisoners experiment and you are standing there in mirrored sunglasses with a baton in your hand ready to beat me to a pulp when I don’t give you a giggle on command. I see Shawshank but I’m not seeing much redemption.  Mr. Buy Me Jackboots For Christmas and Call Me Saddam Claus.

Lawyers & Bagels

Lawyer buddy writes:

I go into Starbucks and ask if they can toast a bagel. “You can” the Barista replies.  He sees the perplexed look on my face.  “At your home.” He clarifies.  “We can’t toast the bagels. Legal reasons. ”

Lafo responds:

Some hyper attenuated legal posse calculated the liability of toasted bagels across the entire Stabucks system and determined the risk outweighed the benefit of toasting the bagels so they literally removed the finishing service while still offering the raw product. Food prep meets flat pack.

What is even more a statement about the sign of these end times is that the communication all the way down the chain from legal posse to zit faced coffee jockey was not a repackaging of a customer facing service message like “I’m sorry we don’t toast bagels here. Would you prefer a muffin instead?”, rather it is considered completely acceptable to offload the work so you can “take it home” because the lawyers said so. And that’s considered good messaging at the counter because the US is a corporatocracy run by lawyers, Indian casino operators and porno magnates.

You were victimized by your own kind. As you gnawed on that uncooked pasty bread mass I hope you considered your own role in propping up the monstrous legal mechanism and how at heart you may be an OK guy, but through your actions you create the rules and findings that suck the life from the very society upon which you feed.

Face yourself. Take a good hard look at what you are sowing before the day of judgment comes and you are reaping a ring of Hellfire!

The Music Trade

Roommate writes from Baghdad:

I cannot download music here. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to purchase a copy of the CD (which is readily available in England) and mail it to me.

Lafo replies from London:

I am glad to support our forces in the field with the acquisition and delivery of entertainment. Being an executive of some influence in entertainment field I consider doing so patriotic act. Unfortunately I will have to ask around to find out how to purchase a CD as I don’t actually do it myself.

In the corridors of power we try to avoid the retail end of things because while retailing products is useful in making money from others it’s a needlessly expensive way to acquire what you want. For example, when it comes to music I have interns at the office download my song selections from super fast websites and load them into my music player. These interns are young and useful for doing such technical chores.

Like what I’ve done with my interns perhaps you can enlist a couple of young soldiers to work out a way to pull music from digital devices and store them in a single place. You can collect music from your fellows as they arrive and distribute it to curry favor with your colleagues. With such a resource you would enhance your unique position at the base. If the lawyers from the music companies come after you for doing this, cite wartime conditions and back them off by waving around the Patriot Act.