apparentlyt my body craved (more) sleep.
who knew.
edited: speaking of sleep….
Sleep made an awesome band promo picture.
And if you need something to do for the next hour, here’s Sleep’s “Dopesmoker”
Author: hsoi
Um… they didn’t work, but I know something that does.
A man goes to the Family Research Council’s offices in Washington DC and starts shooting.
DC Mayor Vincent Gray doesn’t get it.
…a Herndon man who purchased a firearm on Aug. 9 and brought it “into our city,” Mr. Gray said Thursday on NewsChannel 8.
“He would not have been able to do that in the District of Columbia,” Mr. Gray said,
Not have been able to do what in “your” city? Because it looks like he certainly did. Now I grant, after reading Emily Miller’s trials in obtaining a handgun in Washington DC it’s a tough thing to do, but not impossible. Regardless, this man didn’t seem to care about any laws.
We already have laws on the books that prohibit murder.
We already have laws on the books prohibiting assault.
We already have lots of laws in the books that make it difficult for people to obtain guns and other weapons. Heck, we have laws that can make it difficult to obtain just about anything and everything. I mean, drugs like meth, cocaine, heroin… they’re all banned, but that hasn’t seemed to stop much.
“We don’t need to make guns more available to people,” Mr. Gray said. “There are irresponsible people, there are people who have mental health problems, and the easier access they have to guns the more likely we are to predispose innocent victims, like yesterday, to the use of the guns.”
Actually we do need to make guns, training, and a better mindset available to more people. Why? Because the reason this particular situation didn’t get bad was because someone was willing to fight back. Granted, the extreme cases of someone really hell-bent on causing harm are going to do what they’re going to do. But the vast majority of criminals – petty or large-scale – only do what they do due to lack of opposition. Consider many that do the mass shooting spree stuff… once the cops show up, they commit suicide. They don’t want opposition, they want easy targets. Most criminals wanting to mug someone will hit up the person with their nose stuck in their iPhone as they walk down the street, not the guy with his head up walking like the baddest lion on the plains. Why do most burglaries happen on weekdays between 10AM and 3PM? Because most folks aren’t home thus the burglar won’t face opposition. Why does the rapist attack the woman walking alone a night and not the group of women walking around together? They just want a quick score, not a righteous fight. Consider where many crimes happen — in gun free zones, in places where it’s promoted to curl up and die. It’s rare to see crimes in MMA gyms, police stations, NRA conventions. Why might that be the case?
I don’t disagree with Mayor Gray, that irresponsible people, people with major problems, should be better managed and helped with their problems. But we must remember, someone bent on destruction will do whatever — law will not and do not stop them. I recently read a story where a mass killing occurred via arson, with the arsonist using 2 gallon milk jugs filled with gasoline, and matches. Are we going to ban the corner grocery store? Are we going to require background checks and waiting periods and monthly rationing to fill up our SUV’s? I mean, if grandma’s got a cold, we’ve got laws to make it difficult for her to get a decongestant. We can’t travel in this country any more without being considered a possible terrorist. Why are we looking at addressing symptoms instead of addressing root causes? I grant because it’s easier to make yourself feel like you’re doing something if you can pass a law and ban some talisman of evil… but it doesn’t solve the problem, and typically only makes matters worse.
Mayor Gray, you have lots of laws. Washington DC still makes it immensely difficult for law-abiding people to live their lives. Your laws didn’t stop this from happening. No, what stopped this was a person willing to fight back and stop the madness before it became a tragedy.
If you want to do something to help, Mr. Gray, why don’t you enable good people to fight?
2012-08-16 Dry Fire Practice
Following the TLG 4-week sample dry fire routine.
Week 1, Day 4
Basic routine
- 20 reps of Wall Drill, from extension 2H
- 5 reps of Wall Drill from extension, SHO
- 5 reps of Wall Drill from extension, WHO
- 20 reps of Wall Drill from press-out, 2H
- 5 reps of Wall Drill from press-out, SHO
- 5 reps of Wall Drill from press-out, WHO
More fundamentals. Like I said, probably my favorite routine…. cause I can’t get enough work on it.
2012-08-16 workout – Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 13, Deadlift/Press 1
This diet thing… making me think about program changes.
“Week 1”
- 5 reps – Deadlift (working max: 355#)
- 1x5x145 (warmup)
- 1x5x180
- 1x3x215
- 1x5x235 (work)
- 1x5x270
- 1x8x305 (rep PR)
- 5 reps – Press (working max: 160#)
- 2x5x45 (warmup)
- 1x5x65
- 1x5x80
- 1x3x95
- 1x5x105 (work)
- 1x5x120
- 1x8x140 (rep PR)
- Asst. #1 – DB Rows
- 3 x 10 x 85
- Asst. #2 – Pulldown abs
- 3 x 12 x 110
- Foam Rolling
As mentioned previously, I’m starting to toy with the carb cycling stuff. Nothing necessarily formal, but trying things like denying myself carbs after lunchtime (until breakfast the next day), measuring out my carbs to see “oh, that’s what 1 cup of brown rice looks like” and so on. Just things to get a handle on the function of things so when I start carb cycling I can know better what to do… and if I can do it.
So the past couple days have been low on carbs and I think it showed this morning. Sure I set rep PR’s, but I really had to grind and just felt flat all workout long. I also cut the assistance work short for three reasons: 1. I felt flat and pooped 2. didn’t want to overdo things if this diet thing is going to cut into recovery, 3. time. I started late today and gee… part of why I went to 2x week was time, but this program of 2 main lifts and then enough assistance work just takes too long… like 1:15 to almost 1:30, which is too much especially when you incorporate the walk to and from the gym.
So if there’s going to be energy issues… if there’s going to be time issues… it starts to reinforce my desire to try a BBB-like protocol when I officially hit the diet (starting next cycle, so 3 weeks from now). It’ll still be 2x a week, but like “option 2” of Wendler’s 2x week program, it’ll be a 6 week cycle with week 1 doing Squat and Bench, and week 2 doing Deadlift and Press, then you go to the next “week”. Yeah it takes longer but so what? My primary goal isn’t strength or mass, it’s fat loss. So I do the one main lift; repeat lift at lower weight, more reps, less rest between sets; then one more assistance exercise. That cuts the total number of sets per workout almost in half, it’ll be a lot less time too because rest between sets won’t be 5 minus (other than the 1 main lift), I only have to focus on one big lift instead of two. Yeah, I think that might work out better for me in a lot of ways.
Just thinking aloud tho… nothing is settled.
More things I’ve learned about Jenkins
At the day job, I’m still working with Jenkins and our build system. I’ve written about some things I learned at the onset, and now I’d like to add some things I’ve learned since then.
Plugins
Be mindful of them. There’s a great many out there that can help you solve things, but they seem to also bring much risk. For example, Jenkins was going belly-up at least a couple of times a day. I’d look in the system console and see some plugin that I wasn’t even using (just had installed) was somehow causing memory failures, throwing an exception, and Jenkins went stupid and had to be restarted. Once you figure out what plugins you need, uninstall every other plugin. Keep your system as minimal and tight as possible to avoid introducing risk or uncertainty.
Backups
I had to write a lot of custom scripts (some bash, a lot of ruby). These files I can keep in our version control system. But Jenkins files themselves are harder to do. Make sure you have a backup strategy. Make sure you run it often while you work. Working on a Mac and using Time Machine is useful… make a change, screw up, easy to revert.
Updates
Don’t apply an update unless the changelog shows it directly affects you. For example, the git plugin was just updated to fix a regression that prevented using env parameters in the branch name — I need that, so I upgraded that plugin. This goes back to the plugin issues I mentioned above… and if you screw up, it goes back to my backup issue I mention above. 🙂
Planning
Do your best to plan your jobs and pipeline. Figure out the abstract ideal that you want. Then figure what Jenkins can offer to get you there. You might find plugins, but you might also have to write your own scripts and other management.
Then, don’t be afraid to revise and revise again, even starting over if you have to.
DIY
I wanted to use a lot of plugins, because they’re supposed to make it easy, right? Well, it depends. The Xcode plugin is supposed to make it easier to do xcodebuild-based, builds. And in theory it does, but our needs are different and so I just have to get dirty with our own scripts.
The email-ext plugin is really cool, but I couldn’t get it to understand and bring in a bunch of env vars and do other bits of logic processing that we needed. So again, scripting to the rescue. Net::SMTP to the rescue.
CodeSign problems
I noticed from time to time that I’d start a build and eventually xcodebuild or ‘xcrun PackageApplication’ would fail:
“There are no valid public/private key pairs in the default keychain”
It seems this would happen after rebooting the machine (and Jenkins started up via the launchd stuff). I could manually use launchctl to unload then (re)load and things might be back to normal, but that’s annoying.
I found this post at stackoverflow.com, and adding the “SessionCreate = true” key/value to the launchd plist seems to do the trick.
But then further down things failed out. Despite the codesign command line tool being granted special Keychain access, it still hated life:
<path to build output app>: User interaction is not allowed.
Uh…
So I found this and added a:
security unlock-keychain -p "" login.keychain
in the custom ruby script before invoking xcodebuild and PackageApplication.
BTW, I don’t have the passwords encoded into the script. Remember the use of the .netrc file? Use that.
Speaking of .netrc… it seems curl doesn’t like a .netrc where newlines separate entries… it wants everything on one line.
Passing Data to Downstream Jobs
Using Jenkins’ parameterized build mechanism, I was able to pass parameters around. I’d have the main build job, which would then use the promoted builds plugin to allow me to move the build through a pipeline, like to promote to QA, then promote to the App Store, or whatever. But there’s a lot of information from the main build job that I want the downstream jobs to have so the jobs can be properly named, emails can be properly formatted, version control tags set up, whatever. I found the easist way to do this was at the end of the main build job to use a little ruby scripting, create a Hash with all the things I cared to preserve, use YAML to preserve it to file, make sure the build job archived and fingerprinted that .yml file, and moved that “config.yml” file along with the rest of my archives and promotions. Then it’s simple enough to load and look up key/values out of the config.yml file in the later job scripts.
Tagging Git
One of the downstream jobs is a “deploy to the Apple app store” job. Certainly when we do that we want to tag our github-hosted repository with info about the build so we can know what was deployed. Trouble is, at that phase of the build pipeline we don’t have source code. So we can’t just “git tag” then “git push”. What to do? Use the github v3 API. In that config.yml file I was able to preserve the SHA hash of the code we used, so that’s all we need.
At first I thought to use the Tags API, but as I played with that it didn’t work. Even if I could create a tag, it wouldn’t show up in the Tags area of my git GUI app SourceTree. In fact, it started to give errors about refs. So I started to play with the References API and tried things like:
$ curl -XPOST --netrc https://api.github.com/repos/:user/:repos/git/refs \
-d '{"ref":"refs/tags/MyTestTag","sha":"be43262431c7a4b9db67a23d37f51e7901b9845c"}'
and lo… that seemed to work.
Is that enough? Is that correct? I don’t know. I’m not an expert on the low-level plumbing of git. I have contacted github support, but as of this writing have yet to hear back.
The Journey Continues
That’s all that I have for now.
It’s a lot of work to set up a build system, but it’s rather satisfying to do it. I still have a long ways to go. Right now we just have the basics for building and deploying to help our general workflow. It still needs lots of work for validations, testing, continuous integration, and other good stuff like that. One step at a time.
2012-08-15 dry fire practice
Following TLG’s sample dry fire routine.
Week 1, Day 3, reloads
- 10 reps of wall drill from press-out 2H
- 20 reps reload from slidelock, slow, 2H
- 20 reps reload from slidelock, 3/4 speed, 2H
- 10 reps reload from slidelock, slow, 2H
- 10 reps of wall drill form press-out, 2H
Started late on this, but at least I got it done today. If the goal is to work every day, I have to work every day. It’s weird how some things in life I can get so dedicated on and other things I don’t. Hrm. Something for me to cogitate on.
I really need to find a mag solution. Using regular mags is ok, but you can’t really get the motion of reloads down if things keep hanging up on the slide stop. I do what I can.
One nice thing about today? 70 reps of the press-out. Make ’em count.
on diet
I don’t talk much on diet because well.. it’s the toughest part of fitness things for me. There’s no question it’s where I struggle, it’s where I fail. But I have noticed bringing things to light here, keeping logs, for whatever reason it helps me keep more on track. So, let’s try it with diet. I won’t keep logs like I do for the lifting or the dry fire, but I will try to mention it more and be more up-front about it when and where it’s relevant.
Backstory
I’m not fat, but I carry more fat than I care for. I’ve got a gut and frankly I hate it. I’m 6’3″, weigh 235-240# depending on the day. Semi-recent picture of me here (scroll to the end). If I got down to 200, I’d be feeling and looking much better. But I also cannot track pure weight because weight is made up of fat, muscle, bone, organs, water, etc.. I am working to build muscle, so my weight is going up from muscle growth. I also refuse to follow BMI because it’s a bullshit measure. Really in the end it’s about body composition and the ratio of tissues, and I just want less fat (and more muscle). So while I might target a weight, while I might track weight changes per week, it’s more about composition. I will need to take pictures every week, but well… I am not sure I’ll share them. 😉
My general goal is to keep myself healthy. I grant that I will die someday. So much of what people strive to do is find ways to recapture youth and avoid death. I acknowledge the futility of that, and just want to ensure I can enjoy the life I have while I have it. I know I’ll never be an elite powerlifter, I’ll never total 2000#, but that’s fine with me. If I can be strong enough, mobile enough, and continue to function as well as I can, that’s all I’m wanting and is the general goal that directs me.
So with that in mind, my initial milestone was to get off my butt. I had to give up martial arts for numerous reasons, but sitting on my butt wasn’t welcome. Returning to lifting started out more along the bodybuilding routines that I did as a teenager, but thankfully I got sick and in that downtime discovered Rippetoe and Wendler and it’s been a great year. My goal then became to build strength. Sure build muscle, but I really wanted to be strong because you can have muscles and not be strong but if you’re strong you’re going to also have muscles. But even if I didn’t have sexy bulging muscles, that’s fine… it’s more important to be strong as that’s far more useful.
But in getting bigger you well… you get bigger. I’ve built strength, I’ve built muscle, but I’ve also put on fat. You just have to eat a lot to get big, and that can lead to eating more than needed and thus you pack on fat with the muscles. Typical bodybuilder routine was to have “bulking” and “cutting” cycles, where you’d lift heavy and eat like crazy for some months to pack on the pounds, then you’d cut back on food and bump up the cardio to shed the fat. A constant cycle of binge and purge, if you will. But it tended to work. However that sort of thing is just… painful. I’m just not cut out for it. It’s simple. I love food way too much.
See… I recall watching a video on Rich Gaspari. Back when I was a teenager, Rich was my bodybuilding idol. In this video I watched Rich having a family dinner, but he was dedicated to his bodybuilding lifestyle and eating something different from everyone else. Then there was something about his breakfast, and I don’t recall the whole concoction, but it was rather bland and well.. functional. It certainly was the right thing for his lifestyle and greater goals, but there was no pleasure nor fun in that food, from my point of view. When I look at the typical bodybuilder diet plans of chicken breasts and rice, that’s fine for a day or two, but 3 months of that shit would drive me mad. I respect those guys for what they do, but I can’t do that (I’ve got different goals in life). I love food. Not that I love eating crappy food, I just know the wonderful things out there in the world and I wish to enjoy them. It’s like that opening scene in the Pixar movie “Ratatouille” where Remy is talking about one flavor, then another, but put them together and it’s sensational… that’s what I like. Compounding things, Wife is an awesome cook.
Carb Cycling
Backing up a bit, before I went back to the gym I tried shedding some of the fat through simple diet changes. A friend of mine had pretty good success following this “Up Day, Down Day” diet. I tried it and actually lost some good weight and got myself to 212. But you can see in the 1.5 years since falling off that wagon I put 30# on. I know a fair portion of that is muscle, but there’s no question flab came with it. It was tough doing that diet because of the denial, but it worked alright. And when you start to think about the logic behind why it works well… it leads me to think about… carb cycling.
As I’ve been researching stuff on lifting, of course you come across diet issues. These days the two big dietary plans (ignoring “bloat”) seem to be things from John Kiefer, like Carb Nite and Carb Backloading, and then Carb Cycling from guys like Shelby Starnes. It’s all about playing with carb (and other macronutrient) levels, when you take them, and how much you take of them. Given how I was able to deal with Up Day Down Day, plus given all that I’ve learned and much that’s changed in my diet since then (e.g. how we get the weekly veggie box from a local farmer) well.. I wonder if Carb Cycling could work for me.
The trouble is… numbers.
Look at this plan from Shelby Starnes. Now compare to this version from Christian Thibaudeau.
Here’s how it would work out for me, at my present 240# bodyweight
Starnes:
High Day
Protein: 240g – 300g
Carbs: 480g – 720g
Fat: as little as possible
Low & Moderate Days
Protein: 300g – 360g
Carbs: 120g – 360g
Fat: 36g – 84g
Thibaudeau
BMR: 2237 kcals/day, base but I’d cycle between 1.2 (off days) and 1.6 (work days) so 2685 kcals on off days and 3580 kcals on work days. BUT since I want to lose weight, that becomes 2148 off and 2864 work. Using those then, macros calculate out to:
High
Protein: 360g
Carbs: 375g
Fat: 29g
Low & Moderate
Protein: 360g
Carbs: 225g – 300g (low – mod)
Fat: 29g
So you can see, there’s a lot of variation here. Some overlap, some general agreement, but gee… what to follow? What to do?
Then I read this article that tries to simplify things.
To quote Vinnie Barbarino, “I’m so confused!”
I’m not starting this in earnest yet. I still have at least 2 more Wendler cycles to go through because I want to get my bench press to 225#. But I am going to continue reading and trying to figure things. Plus I can start trying to do a few useful things. First, I’ve been very good about measuring/weighing my protein consumption but not my carbs. Today when getting my dinner I scooped my brown rice into a measuring cup to see what 1 cup of cooked rice actually looked like (more than I thought!). I can work on measuring and seeing what I really am eating, what am I actually consuming and how carbs calculate out so I can get a handle on things. I can also see about carbs before noon, only. That seems to be a constant no matter what flavor I follow, so let’s see what I can do there.
If I could drop 40#, that’d be awesome and a great bit of progress, but that’s merely a guide because again it’s more about composition than numbers. I reckon that could take me up to 6 months, and that’s going to require a metric ton of dedication. I do hope I can do it. I hope Wife can tolerate and support me through it. 🙂 But I may only try running this for 2-3 months and then reevaluate. We’ll see.
Wish me luck.
2012-07-24 dry fire practice
Following TLG’s sample dry fire routine.
Week 1, Day 2, draws.
- 10 reps of wall drill from press-out 2H
- 20 reps of wall drill from holster 2H
- 5 reps of wall drill from holster, SHO
- 5 reps of wall drill from holster, WHO
- 10 reps draw & fire at 3/4 speed, 2H
- 10 reps draw & fire slow 2H
Had more front sight dips than I cared for. Tightened up my grip and it went away. That’s a big thing for me to work on right now: keeping a tight grip during dry fire. Or rather, keeping a tight grip always.
True Nutrition Whey – Round 2, Natural Chocolate
“Natural” Chocolate
This is their chocolate flavor using stevia as a natural sweetener.
In a word? No.
Actually I need more words: Hell No.
The first time I tried it, I had a scoop of the unsweetened chocolate, so I mixed that with 1 scoop of this stuff. The first thing I noticed? Different colors. The unsweet was a darker brown, this stevia-chocolate was rather light in color.
The taste?
“Oh Dear God No!”
It was horrid. The mix of that cardboard flavor of the unsweet and this… odd flavor from the stevia.
I tried the stevia-chocolate again in water (all stevia-chocolate this time), and then in some skimmed raw milk (which is about the same as a 2%). While it got a little more palatable each time I tried it, it still is… weird.
I don’t know how to describe it, you just have to try it. The sweet isn’t what I expected. We all know what sugar sweet is like. Honey sweet. And even HFCS sweet. Most sweets try to chase the sweet of sugar, especially artificial sweeteners. This stevia? the taste is nothing like a sugar sweet. It’s sweet, very sweet, wicked sweet… but it’s some sort of different sweet.
I did work to finish the pound that I purchased. It did get a little better, it wasn’t as ugly tasting to drink, but it still left this weird taste in my mouth, a weird aftertaste, and that never went away and never became pleasant to me. I gave it as fair a shot as I could give it.
I won’t totally write off stevia yet, because maybe it’s this particular batch or this particular mix. Maybe it’ll taste better in other products. But I will say I’m in no rush to try it again. If I go the rest of my life never having stevia again, I’m OK with that.
I know some people are all happy about stevia. I’ve spoken with a few people and they are crazy about the stuff. Well, they can have it. 🙂
2012-08-13 dry fire practice
Following TLG’s sample dry fire routine.
Week 1, Day 1, basic routine
- 20 reps of wall drill from extension 2H
- 5 reps of wall drill from extension SHO
- 5 reps of wall drill from extension WHO
- 20 reps of wall drill from press-out 2H
- 5 reps of wall drill from press-out SHO
- 5 reps of wall drill from press-out WHO
Start of “cycle 2” of this routine.
Probably my favorite day/routine because it’s the fundamentals.
