Big Update! (with pictures AND video!)

I really need to try to be better about keeping up with this thing so I don't have to set aside an hour whenever I want to make a post. Now that my class is over, perhaps my posting frequency will increase.

As I mentioned, my class is finally over!!! I learned a lot, but it was a pretty intense 6 weeks. I may have mentioned it previously, but the first two weeks were individual projects and we pretty much got one assigned every day that was due the following day. The next 4 weeks were group projects. We would get the general category of application we were to develop and our group (groups changed every week) on Thursday. We then presented what we had decided to develop on Friday. Worked on it all week, then presented our work to the class on Thursday, where we were again presented with a new category and new group. Kind of intense! The last week we got to choose groups and the three other people in Tyson's research group and me worked together on a real world, first person shooter-type game. Yuval had already started it, so that worked in our favor, and it was loosely based off the game CounterStrike. Once we got it to a presentable state (not near fully functioning), we recorded some clips with my phone so I could edit together a video for our presentation. It is kinda goofy, but I heard everyone enjoyed it (I had to miss class to head out of town). Check it out!

So I missed the presentation because MC and I decided to go visit my sister for some fun activities in Nashville. We left midday on friday and joined her at her friend Jenny's house. They had some food ready for us that was super scrumptious, then we just hung out for a bit before hitting the sack early.

Saturday we got up bright and early to head to the RC Cola and Moon Pie Festival in Bell Buckle, TN!
I somehow got convinced into running the 10 mile race with MC, even though I've hardly been training as of late, especially not for running.
I'm not going to lie, it was a pretty rough race. It was super hot and fairly hilly and the sun was just SUPER baking us the entire time! I think my sister heard the heat index was like 106! MC's running schedule called for 6 miles where you run 4 minutes, then walk for 1 minute, then repeat. So we really wanted to keep with that schedule for 6 miles so she would definitely stay with her training regimen. We made it (barely!) and decided to just walk mile 7. After that we started run/walking at 3/2 intervals for a bit, but my calf was hurting and MC started to get a super side stitch. So we walked a lot the last few miles, but we weren't shooting for any times after the 6 miles. Just survival! We DID save just enough to jog in through the finish line, and I always have enough energy to be a goofball. :-)
It felt SO nice to be finished! That is way longer than I had planned to run again, and it pretty much solidified that I could probably run 10ks with training, but I really have no interest in running farther than 10k ever again in my life! As you can tell, we were both pretty pooped!
After we got some refreshments (NOT including Moon Pies since they ran out because stupid gluttonous assholes took way more than they were supposed to) we headed back to Jenny's to shower and such. After we cleaned up, a few of Jenny's friends joined us and we all headed back to "enjoy" the festival. I put it in quotations because it was so oppressively hot that it was hard to truly enjoy much of anything. Lots of crafts, bad food, fat people, and fun entertainment made it quite a unique experience! :-)
And of course, before we left someone in the group had to try out a fried Moon Pie! Heart-healthy it ain't, but it sure looked tasty! MC and I refrained, mostly because the idea of eating a hot and fried snack in the oven in which we were meandering sounded like an unappealing prospect. It DID receive rave reviews by the rest of the group though. :-)
After we left the festival we regrouped at Jenny's house, grabbed our stuff, then MC and I followed Lauren back to her apartment. She moved fairly recently, so it was cool to see her snazzy new place! I relaxed there while the girls got ready then we headed downtown to check into our hotel (Hampton Inn of course!). After we were all checked it, we hung out a little more until the Taste of Music City (food and drink festival) was about to start. Luckily, our hotel was only a couple blocks from the bridge on which it was going down so, even though it was still ridiculously hot, it wasn't a bad walk.
Lauren's friend Neal got us passes so we got in free and felt super snazzy! Basically you pay to get in, and then all these local restaurants have booths set up with samples of their cuisine. Eat as much as you can! One booth had carved a watermelon, which was pretty cool.
There was so much good food, I just wished I had more room to store it! I also wished it wasn't so ridiculously hot. Even my sister and MC were baking and they are always cold! Luckily, Yazoo was there (a local brewery), which made it all a little better. ;-)After we had all reached capacity, we moseyed back to the hotel to cool off a bit. The Hampton Inn was downtown, so the view was pretty snazzy to enjoy while we digested a bit.
We then walked over to one of my favorite places in Nashville, the Big Bang Piano Bar. We got there early enough that we avoided the cover and got a table right up front!
I don't know if you can see very well in the picture, but there are two pianos facing each other and multiple guys that rotate in and out and they can all play the hell out of a piano! There is also a drum kit and a bass behind them that guys occasionally play (even the bartender joined in on a couple songs!). It was really cool to sit so close and watch them play. It is totally on request so people just write what they want to hear and put it and a little motivation money on the piano. The guys can play so many frickin' songs it is ridiculous! Lauren's roommate joined us halfway through the evening, but I didn't really get to meet her since we were so close to the loud music. MC talked to he a little bit and she seemed nice enough :-) After Big Bang, we went back to the hotel and Lauren headed back to her apartment.

In the morning we packed up, then met up with Lauren at Noshville for a super yummy breakfast. MC had fallen in love with some bread we had at the Taste of Music City, so we stopped by the bakery and grabbed a loaf before we hit the road back to Tally. Sunday evening we had planned to try to get a lot done around the apartment, but we were pretty bushed so we mostly took it easy.

MC had a personal day that she had to take before the end of June, so she decided to take it on monday (My birthday!) so we could hang out all day. We got a few productive things done and a lot of fun hanging out and relaxing. MC had gotten me a little gift that she said we could both enjoy, so I was pretty excited to open it!
It was an Indian cookbook!!! I love Indian and curry, so needless to say I was pretty excited. I can't wait to try out some recipes! And if fit in perfectly with the theme of the day. Since I had said I wanted to do Indian for dinner, MC decided to give me some glimpses into Indian culture. She got a bunch of snazzy Indian music for us to listen to while we were doing stuff around the house and looked into getting an Indian movie from Netflix for us. She even made me some of the Indian spiced tea we had. It was a pretty cool idea. That afternoon I got an Edible Arrangement from my parents! It was funny too, because my sister and MC were just talking the day before about how cool edible arrangements are. And the theme of mine was perfect!
For dinner I decided I wanted just a quiet dinner with my sweetie so we went to Essence of India (which happens to also be where we had our first date!)
As always, it was ridiculously yummy and made for some awesome leftovers for me the next day as well! And keeping with the Indian theme, MC showed off some Indian garb that she had gotten from her grandmother (though I don't know if she'd like me posting pics, so you'll just have to visualize it) The Indian movie we wanted to watch didn't quite work out, so we are just going to Netflix it if we ever watch Changeling :-) All-in-all it was a very awesome birthday and I look forward to celebrating with friends this weekend! For now I'm enjoying not being in class, working my way up to do a little research later in the week, working on building a spice rack for our kitchen and doing various chores that I let fall to the wayside while I was busy with class. Here's hoping I can get things back in order and keep them there! :-)

RC Cola and Moon Pie 10 Miler

I hadn't been training a lot and we planned to do a lot of walking, so this really wasn't a race for time. Definitely a race to see if I could even finish! This was by far the longest race I've done other than the one half marathon I did with mom. The course was rolling hills through pasture with one big hill at the end of mile 4. The heat was ridiculous and we got completely baked the whole time. It was pretty rough.

MC is in training with a couple friends and had a training run scheduled for that day so we started off keeping her schedule. So for the first 6 miles we alternated running for 4 minutes and walking for 1. The heat made it kinda brutal, but I was surprised how well my body held up and was stoked that my calf didn't bother me. After we completed her 6 miler, we walked mile 7, then mostly walked with some mixed in jogging for the rest of it. MC developed a harsh side stitch and my calf was hurting (but in a different place) and it was only getting hotter so we just did our best to not finish completely last :-) Our time wasn't stellar, but I want to see what our 5 mile split looked like and I'm honestly just glad to have finished without injury. Maybe I should be better about the whole "training" thing. ;-)

MC and I had the same times:

5 mile split - 57:11
total time - 2:13:18

Fitness Test!

So I found out the other day that FSU does free fitness testing for students. It is basically a barrage of tests to evaluate your general fitness level so you know where you stand and what to work on to improve. It includes a body composition test, which I like as a good measure of progress as I am increasing my workouts, so I decided to go for it! I don't know how often they offer it, but hopefully after a few months of training I can redo it and see how I've progressed.

First off is blood pressure.

This was actually done with the little machine that you sit in and it does it automatically. I don't know why, but whenever I am tested by one of these it says my Systolic is pre-hypertensive, but every time I have had it actually checked by a person it has been in the normal range. Either way, I'm not too worried about that one.

Next up is VO2 max.
Kinda funny that I was exactly at the 50th percentile for this one. For this I had to run around the little track in Leach and see how far I could go in 12 minutes. I believe the inside lane (of 3) is 1/10 of a mile, but I can't remember how far the outside lane is (the one I ran in). I got 14 laps right on the nose, but that was definitely a faster pace than I am used to running! The VO2 max number seems a little low, but talking to the guy he said that if you are more prone to other sports (e.g. cycling or swimming) this can register a little low. I've been swimming and doing the stationary bike more as of late (not too much running) so I think my actual number is a little higher. Perfectly average isn't horrible though!

Strength
There were two aspects to this one. Overall strength and endurance. Since I have been having trouble with my rotator cuff, we used one of the machines to test my bench max since it allowed me to rotate my grip to take stress off my shoulder. It listed my bench max as 190, but I think that is actually a little high considering how much I have been lifting, but who knows. For the situps it was the number I could get in a minute and for pushups it was the most I could do without stopping (no time / if you pause, you're done). I did the bench max test, then the situps, then the pushups, but I still think I could have eeked out a few more pushups if I hadn't done the bench not that long before. Maybe that would just offset the fact I think my bench max is a little high. :-)

Flexibility (I knew this would be my worst)
And sure enough it was! Especially when it is tested with the sit-and-reach. My hamstrings are by far the least flexible part of my body. I've actually been working on it, but I definitely wasn't surprised when I was in the "fair" category.

Body CompositionLike I mentioned previously, this was one of the main reasons I wanted to do the fitness test. I got tested sometime last year, but don't know if I wrote it down anywhere. Before that, it had been quite a few years since I had been tested. I would say I was fairly happy with where I am at, but still have plenty of room to improve. Also kinda gross to think that I have 23 pounds of fat on me!

So with all this information it calculated my body age.
27?! No wonder I feel so young! At least my body isn't OLDER than it is supposed to be!

After all this information, it gave a list of ways to improve my body age and maybe even get down to 18! haha. I don't know about that, but any hints are helpful and hopefully I will continue my workout regimen through the summer and can get tested again to evaluate my progress!

Things just keep a kickin'!

Man, we have been staying crazy busy as of late. I am going to be SOOO glad when this class is over and I get to relax a little bit and don't have constant deadlines to keep up with. Anyhoo...

So friday in my house growing up was always pizza night. It still is whenever I'm home, but I haven't really kept the trend going when I've been off at school. Sometimes Friday is rolling around and I just get the urge for pizza, though, so I give in. Sometimes I order, sometimes we make our own. The former is easiest, but we've gotten some pretty darn good pizzas with the latter! I got a yummy sourdough crust and started concocting a veggie pizza friday night.

All veggied up!	Add some cheese
Bake and serve!	MC dressed up plate up a bit more

If I remember correctly, the pizza had yellow squash, broccoli, spinach, green pepper, yellow pepper, red pepper, and onion. Especially on a sourdough crust it was super duper ultra yummy!! MC added some sides to hers, but I stuck with beer as an accompaniment ;-)

Technological Bitchings

Arrgghh!!

1. Mac's thin profile Aluminum keyboard & how they were too stupid to thoroughly test it
   
   I got one of those snazzy, thin Aluminum keyboards not that long ago. As I don't like dealing with batteries and such, and my keyboard never leaves the area near my computer, I went with the wired version. Did this a little while ago, and have only had a couple of issues.
   
   
   
   • They decided to be "cool" and "different" and remap the Function keys at the top of the keyboard. The new layout itself isn't horrible, but they left out the expose for a single application button and the show desktop, and moved them around. So when I want to access my dashboard on my macbook, I hit F12. When I want to on my iMac I hit F3. I could remap some of them, but they don't provide an easy way to map any keys to volume controls. To make this even more of a pain, they actually printed icons on the keys to represent a lot of the functions, so even if I could remap things, I would have to hit the mute key on my macbook to access Expose (since F3 brings up Expose on my desktop). So I'm stuck with either have two different button configurations and accurate key icons, or remapping them on one of the computers, having the icons not be actually indicative of the function on those keys, and would have to use my mouse to open my sound settings to be able to adjust the volume. Really, Apple? REALLY?! For a company that prides itself on design, this is a UI turd. (User Interface for you non-CS types)
   
   
   • In addition to mucking up the F keys, they somehow made the keyboard so it is recognized later in the boot process. While this may not seem like much of an issue, I have used Boot Camp to dual-boot my computer with windows. While I despise Windows, I do run into occasions where I find it necessary (e.g. the idiots at RIM only provide Blackberry Management software for Windows so I can't adequately backup/restore/upgrade my Storm without it). Just so happens, this time shift in keyboard recognition handily shifts it to AFTER you must hold down the option key to bring up the boot menu. So I can hold down any keys I want, it isn't even going to check them until it has gone ahead and decided to boot the default OS. In OSX, I can choose Windows to be my default, then restart, and vice versa in Windows. After some digging I found that you can use the remote that comes with it, hold down menu, and that brings it up. So they recognize the little remote that is just for playing media before the OS is booted, but not the keyboard? WTF mate? This is an APPLE keyboard on and APPLE computer using APPLE software to dual boot. They make all their own hardware!? How hard can it be to test something before you release it? I used to think it'd be cool to work at Apple, but with the quality of employees they seem to currently have on staff, I am beginning to have my doubts.
   
   


2. My second techy rant has to do with my Blackberry Storm. Apparently they have an Idiot-for-idiot hiring deal with Apple. They put 1 frickin' gigabyte of memory on the phone (which sounds awesome) then arbitrarily divide up in a completely nonuseful way. So I have a gig on board, and it comes with an 8gig microSD card. What takes up the most room on a phone nowadays? Media. So I have 8gigs to store movies, audio, ringtones, pictures, etc. Do you think I will need to store any of that on my phone? Of frickin' course not. On the phone I will have my contacts, calendar, applications and that's about it. So I have a gig at my disposal right? NOPE. The dingleberries at RIM decided I shouldn't really have too many applications so I'm limited to like 100 megs (don't feel like looking up the exact figure) of space for applications and the rest is for personal data. Do you know how many contacts and calendar events I would need to fill frickin' 900 megabytes of space? That is the most back-ass-ridiculous way to divide that space. Why divide it at all? Why do you need to limit the amount of space I can use for applications and personal data? If I want 700 megs of apps and 2 of personal stuff, so be it. If I don't want to install any apps but want to keep the entire phonebook in my cell phone (just in case) that should be my choice. An arbitrary, nay stupid, division of memory is not helpful to anyone. And to make it worse, they won't even allow their own stuff to cross the boundary! I'm trying to update the software, and it wants to only use application space to hold the update and any install files. Of course I don't have 20 megs worth of space, but I DO have 850 worthless megs of "personal storage." God these guys suck.
   

So that's the end of my rantings. This should not be that difficult. It's no wonder our economy sucks when big corps like RIM and Apple charge an arm and a leg for underdesigned crap.

Ok, I'm adding one more... WHY WON'T NESTED ORDERED LISTS WORK IN LJ! I've been trying to just make the two sub-rants of the first rant automatically be a and b, but it just ignores any indicators and always makes them 1 and 2. Sometimes technology can really be a bitch.