A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

classicaljunkie and I got Wii Fit as an early Xmas prezzie. It's nice! I recommend it if you have a Wii but lack a solid exercise regimen. I'm skeptical about the game's longevity, but it is teaching me some new, worthwhile stuff. If nothing else, it's like a super-interactive exercise video, with feedback.

It's a bit too interactive at times, though. It needs a mode where it leads you through a workout of several linked exercises, rather than letting you choose exercises one-by-one until you feel like stopping. Not only do I not always want to choose, but the break of a minute or two for menu navigation and (unskippable) high-score-list admiration feels artificial.

Sometimes it does suggest a good follow-on exercise after you complete something, but instead of offering you a "Hey great let's do that" button, it leaves it to you to find where in the menu-maze that second exercise is, and start it up yourself. How could they miss this?

It'd also be nice if you could navigate the menus using only the foot device, a la DDR, rather than having to pick up and put down the Wii Remote all the time, often just to press the A button. Really, would puttting an extra A button in toe's reach on the board have been that hard? (It already sports a toe-friendly power buttton.)

And, too bad about the BMI, which everyone (even my doctor) seems to agree isn't a very useful metric, at least in terms of presenting a normal/overweight/obese range that hardly applies to all humans. But we knew about this deal ahead of time, so we're not taking it too seriously. We laugh as the Wii performs its initial judgement on new players, which is invariably HELLO YOU ARE ENORMOUS followed by ploomp ballooning up the player's on-screen Mii, who is like "WTF". whatever

DDR Supernova is nice. I was originally resistant to the notion of completing special obstacle courses in order to unlock songs, but they are clever and encourage you to explore the various song-tweaking options that have been in the games since the beginning but which I've never bothered messing with. These mostly involve ways to change how the arrows move and appear, such as reversing the flow of arrows, or making them appear only halfway up the screen, or having them move at unpredictable speeds. It's sort of a DDR scavenger hunt, and I like it.

I can do 7-footers comfortably and some 8-footers with exertion and luck. This may be my plateau.

Also, today I bought a song on iTunes because I heard it in a DDR game, which is a first for me. It is "Jerk It Out" by Caesars. Which makes me think of someone trying with violent motions to get the last bit of caesar salad dressing from the bottle, but in fact if you listen to the iTMS sample you will hear the chunkly filtered organ riff that I found highly catchy and happy and worth a dollar. Very fun to stomp arrows in time to, as well.

Have gotten into an exercise routine lately where I spend about an hour playing DDR and then doing some push-ups and other floor exercises. Though the results have been fast - I'm definitely building up strength, able to do a few more reps every day - I'm sure my form is terrible. I looked at WP's page on push-ups, which have a totally boss animated GIF of a guy doing push-ups forever, but its caption (doubtless provided by a later contributor) criticizes his bad form. Uh, and now I look at the page and the picture's gone.

This video is the number-one googley hit for "how to do push-ups". It is not how I have been doing them. I like the suggestions for making it easier, and easier again, for newbs. I remember doing the easiest kind, with bent knees, when I went to "special gym" in grade school. But today, my shoulders hurt at the bone level after doing whatever horrible thing I was doing that was apparently not push-ups, so maybe I'll try this chest-to-the-floor way tomorrow.

The landlord called last night to complain about the noise. This happens most times someone besides me plays a jumpy or stompy video game with me at my house. I have practiced enough at DDR to develop a light touch with these games, though I think it was actually a jumpy WarioWare game that did it in this case.

She is very old and still doesn't understand voice mail, so when she leaves a message she often grows increasingly upset in the process of speaking. This is because she can hear someone knocking around downstairs, and figures they must be willfully ignoring her voice coming out of the answering machine. All I can do when I listen to the message later is grit my teeth and make a mental note to clamp down harder on the NO JUMPING law, like ol' Big Brother in the groundbreaking 1983 Atari coin-op I, Robot. Uh-huh.

She and I spoke on the phone the other day about whether or not I was leaving. Full of my usual inertia (and my low-money state), I said I'd like to stay another year. This led to her asking about all the strange men with keys who come in and out of my apartment all day long. I told her that it was just the Andys, who were working with me on a project, but they have both returned their keys and now the only one holding a copy is my girlfriend. She said "Oh girlfriend that is OK she is good!" in what sounded oddly like relief. classicaljunkie advances the theory that she may have been pleased to discover that I apparently wasn't being all gay on her property. I really don't know and I expect that I never will, because I don't like talking to my landlord.

While I haven't signed any leases yet (it's way too early), I already feel off-kilter about staying here more. It's nigh-inevitable that I have at least another year here, but I find myself distinctly not thrilled about it. For one thing, this will be my fifth year at this address, far and away the longest I've ever lived in one spot, and saying nothing about how I pay $1,200 / month for the privilege. That is actually a reasonable price for an apartment of this size in this area, but the thought of pouring it into the same sinkhole for an entire half-decade seems wrong. If I'm this geographically stable, shouldn't I own?

I'm thinking: probably. Not right now, because my net worth today is close enough to zero, since I spent all my savings on the startup last year, and then borrowed a lot when it took an extra-special long time for my new day job to remember that they hired me. (In fact, I spent this past weekend pulling together my personal finances, and can report that it's rather depressingly negative if you don't count my retirement accounts.) But I should start thinking about it anyway. Let this post mark when I started thinking about it.

Yii... I have gained over 10 pounds since I last checked my weight. (This may have been last year.)

Not very oddly, it has been a while since I stopped walking to Harvard and back every other day, and longer since I last DDRed.

I just warned Zarf that I may spontaneously bust out the pads at any moment.