I'm trying a free week at the local gym. Julie has been going there for a while, going to exercise classes and using the treadmills or elliptical machines. Now that we're down to one day a week of Ultimate, I thought I'd try going to the gym this winter.

Monday was my first night. I was just going to get familiar with the weight machines, but, after I started doing that, Julie got done with her class and told me I should try the Boot Camp class that was about to start. So I did.

About 20 minutes into the class, I got flush. I didn't see myself, despite all the mirrors, but that's what they were telling me. The teacher got me a wet towel and I took a break for a bit then rejoined the class. I turned white again, got a little nauseous, and was fairly close to passing out. The teacher got me a Gatorade and I tried to cool down.

Before I left the gym I had thrown up. Evidently, I had not eaten much Monday. What I had eaten, a couple volcano tacos, I had eaten recently. My blood-sugar level must have been pretty low.

I went back to the gym late Wednesday, about an hour before they close. I got in about 45 minutes on the elliptical cross-trainer machine. I kept my heart rate around 160 for most of that and the machine said I had run about 4.5 miles. And I'm not sore today. Cool. Oh, and I didn't throw up. Bonus.

I tried many times over the past few days to find or configure a system I liked so that I could take advantage of one of the deals for Cyber Monday or Black Friday, but I kept running into dead ends.

The one I was most excited about had a quad core processor, 4GB RAM and a 320GB hard drive, but I finally figured out it only came with 64-bit Windows Vista, which would cause me more problems that I could handle.

So I started looking on Ebay and found a system with the following:

2.4 gHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
2GB of DDR2 RAM
160GB hard drive (everthing's eSATA now, right?)
CDRW/DVDRW drive
Media card reader
6 rear USB 2.o ports
3 front USB 2.0 ports
Windows XP Professional
Keyboard, mouse, power cord, manuals and software discs

I paid $284 with IL sales tax and free shipping. What do you think? Maybe this one will last me 11 years, like the one Troy got me in 1997 or 1998?

The one Troy got me is my second computer and that's the one I'm using now. It's got:

500 mHz Pentium III processor
767MB SDRAM (3 x 256)
30 GB hard drive (Ultra ATA)
160 GB hard drive (Ultra ATA)
Windows XP Professional SP3
DVD RW
CD-RW
Floppy drive
Zip drive
5 USB 2.0 ports
2 USB 1.0 ports

My first computer was an Apple IIe, by the way. I guess I have a precedent of going long stretches without buying a new computer.

Made it through a week in Vegas! I had a conference for work hosted at Bally's / Paris Sunday through Friday. Jantina and I used our Marriott timeshare to get a two-bedroom and her Mom and Wayne came down from Oregon to vacation with Jantina while I was working (and to hang out in the evenings too). As soon as we landed we headed to In-N-Out for burgers and fries. We were starving because the flight times, combined with timezone changes, forced us to skip a meal. We both had a lot of fun site-seeing, shopping and eating.

By the end of the week Tillman and Jenna flew in and spent the remainder of our time in Vegas with us. Since my conference was wrapped up, we were able to stay up late and "party" (in the most conservative use of that word, haha). Matt taught me how to play Craps, and apparently I was a hot roller and made people lots of money... the players started tipping me :-) That was fun, they also gave Tillman and I nicknames, "Yellow" (because I was wearing a yellow t-shirt), and "Jacket" (because Matt was wearing a suit jacket over his T-shirt). Not overly creative, but these other players were pretty toasty I think. Besides, it made our team name "Yellow Jacket"... probably a coincidence, but it did remind me of the old pro-wrestling WWF team "Killer Bees"! Our physiques don't compare exactly, but it was fun nonetheless.

At dinner Saturday night (at craftsteak), the T-1000 (a.k.a Robert Patrick) sat at a table next to us, that was pretty cool. Jantina didn't want to make a big scene, so she simply texted me that he was sitting behind me. He had some huge body guards and an entourage of ladies at his table. We assume he was in town for the big UFC fight, it generated a ton of traffic at the MGM that night.

Shortly after we returned from the Las Vegas trip, we drove to Lincoln for Thanksgiving celebrations. On the drive down, we popped in on the Whites in Des Moines for dinner, saw their assembled Ikea furniture (that we helped them load in Minneapolis a while back) and played with Luci and Cameron. It made for a great break to the long drive and was great fun!

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving Travis and Grace, David and Darin, and I had a small LAN party to play Supreme Commander. Travis and I won!

On Thanksgiving we spent the day at my mom's visiting with family and having a huge traditional meal. We found time to play some XBOX (N+, Bomberman, Castle Crashers) and board games (Puerto Rico!) throughout the visit too.

On the drive back to Minneapolis last night there was ton of holiday traffic and the snow brought the roads to a stand still in many locations. Iowa was the worst, can they not use salt on their roads ?! So many cars in ditches, but the roads were immediately better once we hit Minnesota. I understand now why Matt Janet always drives through Wisconsin in the winter, the Iowa department of transportation leaves a lot to be desired!

We've nearly completed our Christmas shopping. Just a few small things left to pick up. That's when we'll be back in Lincoln too, the week between Christmas and New Years.

Places to eat:
Koi Las Vegas
craftsteak Las Vegas
In-N-Out Las Vegas
Gallagher's Las Vegas
Papa Murphy's Des Moines

I made a new iPhone or iPod Touch Webclip icon for the new m.tivo.com page if anyone wants to use it on their . The png icon is here.

Have you seen keyboardr yet? It pulls up results for google, google blog search, google image search and Wikipedia as you type.

My dad told me he saw Brett working at a neighbor's house, helping clean out gutters and/or raking leaves. Brett was working at this same neighbor's during that recent Clean Up Lincoln day.

Speaking of raking leaves, I finally got our yard mostly done yesterday. The sun was out and kept me warm for a while, but then disappeared behind clouds, making it quite chilly. I used Josh's electric mulching mower and the bagging attachment, dumping them from the bag to a 40 gallon plastic bag in our trash can.

I first tried using some smaller bags we had, but that proved to be a royal pain.

I still might use the blower's bag attachment to suck some leaves out of the shrubs. And I might weed whack the dying plants by the front walkway.

I tried the blueberry flavored Kellogg's Frosted Mini-Wheats. They sounded good, but I'm going to stick with the original.

I've been doing lots of travel recently. I spent early September in Dallas for training, then the last week of September in Santa Clara for a customer visit, last week in San Diego for a meeting, last weekend in Orlando (that one was non-work though), and now I'm in Lincoln before heading to Austin for another training session. I just learned that as soon as I get back, I'm going to Des Moines on the 5th 2 days (4th and 5th). The week after that I'm going to Las Vegas!

On top of the travel schedule, work in Minneapolis has been extremely busy. I'm ready for things to slow down a bit, and it won't be long before we have Thanksgiving and Christmas break.. I'm really looking forward to those!

Places to eat:
Matt Tillman took me to Hamano Sushi in San Francisco, and a very unique liquid chocolate cafe too.
Matt Janet introduced me to Old Chicago recently.
While I was in Dallas, I went with a large group of co-workers to try Uncle Julio's.
Probably the most fun eating while we were in Orlando was the night we went to the Epcot International Food and Wine Festival though Carmela's was pretty good too.

Copper just told me Gatehouse Media, the current owners of the State Journal-Register in Springfield and the Lincoln Courier, was delisted from the stock exchange because its price had been too low for too long. I think he said the last listed price was 17 cents. Ouch.

Julie surprised me with an iPod Touch for our anniversary. I'm trying to get familiar with it, but it's fun so far.

App suggestions?

We bought the latest Kings of Leon CD and we're listening to it now, in the car, on the way home from dinner with mom and dad.

We have a couple fun things planned for tomorrow including a visit to a farm and seeing some friends for games and stuff.

A couple weeks ago, Julie and I rescued a dog from the pound.



She was a little standoffish, but started warming up to me when I have her some scritches. I called Julie and she said to go ahead and bring her home.

Fancy was covered in fleas -- maybe 150 or 200, I'm guessing. A bath got a bunch of them off her, but we quickly went to the vet to get anti-flea medication. That took care of the rest of them over the next several hours.

We started looking for a home for Fancy, but we got attached to her fast. Five days after we got her, we found a home for Fancy.

Last Saturday Jantina and I drove to the Whole Foods (its a bit of a drive, we don't go there often) and discovered they had a couple aged new york strips. I've not noticed aged beef in a grocery before, and was pretty excited. So we picked those up, and I also grabbed some dark chocolate that I saw on Diggnation, Kopali Cacao Nibs. It wasn't as good as they went on about, but not bad. I preferred the Dagoba bar that was displayed next to them.

On Wednesday, I opened my MacBook Pro and the screen didn't come on. The front light that usually indicates 'sleep mode' was glowing steadily. I tried several methods to wake it up, reboot, but it just wouldn't come alive. I made an appointment with the Apple store for that night, they confirmed that it was a bad logic board, that the part was in stock, and the repair queue is short. So I left it there and received it back Friday night. All covered under warranty, only cost me a couple days without my computer.

We tried a couple new places to eat too. Down in Orlando, Jenn introduced Jantina to Pei Wei, a spin-off of P.F. Changs. We discovered we had one here, pretty much just around the corner from our place. It was really good, and about 4 dollars cheaper than P.F. Changs per dish. We also re-tried Redstone one afternoon. It is still overpriced, but the patio out back was nice with the mild weather we were having. We usually hit up Jake's for the same reason, to sit outside, and it is more reasonably priced.

New places to Eat:
Pei Wei
RedStone
Jake's

My eyes swelled shut again from rubbing poison ivy in them Thursday. Must remember to stop doing that. I picked up medication Saturday, and the swelling went down a lot by Monday.


I attended a disc golf event Saturday -- the annual Discraft Ace Race -- where everyone just shoots for an ace (hole in one) on each hole. The one with the most aces wins. There were 22 holes and we played the course twice. No aces for me, unfortunately. I did have a few close ones.

Monday evening, Julie and I went out to dinner with Stephanie, who's about to ship out to Ireland for the semester, Josh and Gavin. We also stopped by Beth's and played a few songs on "Rock Band."

Yesterday I got to hang out with Erin for most of the day. We got lunch at Cafe Brio, saw "Traitor," played minature golf and hit a bucket of balls at the driving range at Knights Action Park, shopped a little for a new watch for her. Then I got some dinner at Panera Bread and took that home to sick-feeling Julie.

Today, I'm noticing some changes in Yahoo! Mail ... a little redesign or something. The viewing of attachments seems a little different. And I just noticed that Picasa Web Albums got a redesign.