While queuing up today’s Tour de France stage (the team time trial! one of my faves!), I got pulled into a documentary called Life. Support. Music. and ended up watching the last half of it. An inspiring story of a musician who suffers a brain injury and his family’s resolution that he would make a full recovery.

Posted by bruce as vitality at 12:15 AM UTC

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Heard part of RadioLab’s episode on Sleep the other day and went to their site to listen to the rest since it was so fascinating. Why do we sleep? (clean synaptic noise out) What if we don’t? (molecules can’t fold(!)) What’s up with dreams? (our chance to remix/process our emotional moments of the day).

I need to get some right now. 

Posted by bruce as vitality at 12:25 AM UTC

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I just got firefox to show hockey highlights from NHL.com from linux (Ubuntu Edgy) using the mplayer plugin. I was getting a blank white box where the video was supposed to be. In /usr/lib/firefox/plugins, I moved anything player-related (libtotem*, gxineplugin.so) into a disabled folder and restarted firefox. Then the mplayer plugin loaded but no video. I downloaded the codecs from mplayer and extracted them to /usr/lib/win32. Restart firefox again and now I can see video. Looks like it’s cycling through some URLs until I go into fullscreen or back but it’s basically working so I’m happy!

Now to figure out who to draft in our PDI playoff hockey pool…

Posted by bruce as computing, vitality at 11:28 PM UTC

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Miles found a Sharpie and "expressed himself" on the table before I noticed. Being a permanent marker, I thought I was going to catch some grief about the table so I tried cleaning it off. Water? Of course not. Soap? Nope. WD40? A little and it was a lot of work. Then I remembered my triathlon days and tried a "gel" sports sunscreen (original is Bullfrog but Coppertone has one easily found in most drugstores). My number marked on my legs and arms would come right off if I put sunscreen on after. Worked like a charm!

Sorry Miles. I should’ve at least taken a picture of your artwork.

Posted by bruce as kids, vitality at 3:45 PM UTC

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Here’s an interesting intro into how people are dealing with our modern multitasking work environment. Meet the Life Hackers – New York Times

Aspects which resonate:

• I’ve always craved more screen space. I’d max out the res of my monitor and/or card. I just bought a huge (for me) LCD monitor (Dell 2405) 1920×1200. I think more screen space makes me more productive but sometimes I doubt it because of the interruptions.
• the last few months I’ve often returned to work after the kids go to bed and love it because it’s several hours of uninterrupted time.
• I use my drafts folder at work to track to do items since many come from emails anyway. And I can prioritize them and see them sorted that way.

Posted by bruce as computing, vitality at 11:06 PM UTC

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One very important counter-intuitive concept I learned from Ironman training was: you get fitter when you rest, not when you train. I just read this article from Active.com which gives an introduction to what they call recovery-based training.

Posted by bruce as vitality at 2:05 PM UTC

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I’ve been wanting a blog for a while now to capture:

• fun memories of the kids,
• notes on animated films I’ve seen, want to create, or am creating,
• trials and tribulations in the quest for the ultimate espresso,
• experiences and lessons related to building my physical vitality,
• observations of an unhappy or happy consumer,
• nerdly activities (struggles and successes) including TiVo hacking, and
• usability yeahs and boos.

I experimented with the more general Mambo CMS system but finally settled on WordPress because it’s really much more streamlined for blogging. I’ll be posting stuff in the past and will move this post back in time so it’s the first post so to be honest, the actual creation date of the blog was Nov. 16, 2005.

Posted by bruce as (un)happy consumer, animation, coffee, kids, usability, vitality at 12:23 PM UTC

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