Archive for the 'Iunno' Category

Welding A Workout Widget

Almost a year ago now my good friend Harold (co-star in my Russian adventures as well as many other adventures that I’ve been too lazy to write about on this blog) brought up this crazy internet work-out he’d heard about. This confused me greatly; the internet’s natural tendency is of course to lower one’s levels of exercise. Harold nevertheless talked me into trying to follow the site with him. The site is crossfit.com and since then I’ve been following their workouts almost religiously during those brief times that I’ve been static enough over the past year to have access to weights.

If you’re interested I highly recommend you go exploring their site. In the meantime I can summarize to say that the idea is they post daily workouts that are really really hard and then explain how to scale them down to something you can handle in terms of weight, intensity, time, etc. With clear goals in mind you get awesomely fit and gradually scale less and less until you’re actually doing those really really hard workouts (eventually – mind you I’m still doing plenty of scaling down!). The most important aspect of these workouts is that they’re somewhat randomized, with the idea being that when you plan your own workouts you very quickly fall into routines to which your body naturally adapts so they lose effectiveness. Following a randomized workout routine keeps your body guessing and really does mean, overall, more productive workouts in far less time per day.

The specifics of the exercises that comprise these workouts I won’t go into, except to say that literally the only machine they’d have you use is a rowing machine – and there are substitutions for that as well. If you have access to a weight set, one ten-foot olympic bar, two dumbbells, a pull up bar, and some creativity you can do 95% of the the crossfit workouts. One thing that falls within that 95% are kettlebell swings since one can approximate them by holding onto one end of a dumbbell. But that sucks a lot, especially if you have adjustable weight dumbbells and as you are swinging the thing over your head some of the weight plates seem dangerously close to slipping off and cracking open your skull. I looked online at how much kettlebells cost, and the cheapest was about $40. Unfortunately, the crossfit workouts often call for different sized kettlebells, so to be properly equipped I would have to shell out more like $100+. Since the website only calls for kettlebell swings a couple times a month, I decided this was absurd. So I started looking at alternatives and found these adjustable kettlebells. Really a great idea, but still more than I want to spend on something I won’t actually use all that often, especially considering I would also have to get new weight plates to fit it.

The makers of the adjustable kettlebells brag that since they’re still shaped like real kettlebells they can be used for all sorts of kettlebell moves – moves that I’d never heard of that take advantage of the kettlebell’s roundiness. So it occurred to me that if all I’m doing is holding the handle and swinging, it doesn’t much matter what shape the heavy thing is so long as it has a good handle and fits between my legs. With this in mind my research quickly led me to this T-handle concept.

The next day I headed down to Urban Ore with my dad to find some heavy old pipe fittings appropriate for the task. Digging around the unorganized piles of pipes big, small, and medium, I discovered a mildly rusty old ten-foot Olympic weightlifting bar.

“Nothing could be more perfect!” I exclaimed. “But can we cut it?” I asked my dad.

He looked at me with a grin, “I can cut anything!” My dad has quite an assortment of tools. “We can have James Cline weld it for us. He owes me some favors.” (My dad somehow still lacks his own welding equipment.)

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Cutting the end of the bar to make the piece that holds the weight plates.

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About to cut the handle at the bit where it’s all nice and beveled. We cut it to be exactly two of my hands plus the bottom part in the middle wide.

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Polishing.

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Pre-weld.

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My dad’s friend James warming up the metal before welding.

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Welding takes a lot longer than I thought. (I bought James lunch for his troubles.)

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Polishing the weld.

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Tah-dah!

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Painting it for that final something.

The old bar cost me $4.35 incl. tax.

These and a few more pics here, scroll to the bottom for a few pictures of my current ghetto-fabulous but actually really awesome home gym on my parents’ back deck.

Green Eggs and Exam

I’ve been back in Dalian for about a month and a half, and I’ve eaten barbecue kebabs from the same street stall at least once a week. Never had any trouble. Last Saturday I wanted something quick to eat, so I headed down the block to Chengren Jie, Martyr Street. It was yet early, and my usual barbecue stall was still setting up shop. That block has at least ten other stalls and c’mon, they’re all the same. I choose the next one, and started picking vegetables-on-sticks from the big table. In a moment of daring I said, alright, screw it, I’ll try the green eggs.

The green eggs were disgusting, I swallowed only one bite. The color was clearly not the only problematic result of some kind of microorganism’s handiwork. Sam-I-Am was right to be freaked out all along by these sorts of things, but I believe in trying everything once, even green eggs from a street vendor. The lesson here learned, however, is that one should perhaps not be too adventurous when the next morning one has a standardized test for which one has been preparing, on and off, for months.

The next day I took the HSK and of course I had explosive diarrhea.

H, S, and K are the Pinyin initials (Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì, 汉语水平考试) for the People’s Republic of China’s official Chinese Proficiency Test. Every standardized test in the world must be known by its initials and must test nothing so well as one’s ability to take that test. The HSK fully conforms – even Chinese people call it “HSK” – and I can’t imagine doing well on it without what I learned in my prep class.

Take for example the reading comprehension section. The reading section, at 60 minutes, is the longest of the test’s four sections. On the elementary-intermediate level test one can score from a 3 to an 8 (the so-called basic test is 1-2 and the advanced is 9-11). To get an 8 one should probably know at least about 3000 characters, and 1500 characters should be enough to get the minimum score of 3. (I’m guessing I’m somewhere in the low 2000’s.) The reading comprehension texts love to be about science and nature just to throw people off with lots of specialized vocabulary and characters they’ve never seen before. So what do you do? Look at the questions first, see what characters you don’t know, since they’re the important ones, and then scan the text for those characters. The sentences immediately around those almost always have the answer. This is much faster than slogging through texts you don’t understand just to forget what little you did understand when you get to the questions. An hour might seem like a long time, but there are a lot of questions and time management is everything on these kinds of tests – especially when you miss the first few minutes after racing through the grammar section for a semi-supervised sprint to the bathroom and back.

Here, give it a try:
It's an allegory about hummingbirds.
Full sample test materials here.

My original, rather-high goal for this test was a 6. A month and a half of practice questions made me lower that to a 5 in the name of warding off too much disappointment. Considering my intestinal distractions during those three long, break-less hours of testing, my score might be lower yet.

I had a high, delirious fever that evening, but I’m all the stronger for it now. I’ll be getting my scores in a few weeks.

[UPDATE: I ended up getting a 6 overall and an 8 on the reading.]

Time Zones

Almost universally, one celebrates one’s birthday according to the day on which one was born. One increments one’s years of age by one at the beginning of that day – despite being anywhere up to 23 hours 59 minutes and 59 seconds short of having spent that many years ex utero. So, it seems to me, my birthday in a different time zone, by such practice, should be the day it was when I was born in that timezone. Having been born in the early morning, California time, I managed to make it into the seven hour window of date-overlap (this time of year anyway – daylight savings time) between Korea time and California time. So I say it is just as much my birthday right now, in Korea, as it ever was at any time on November 28th before the actual time of my birth.

Had I been born later in the day, or, if I was currently teaching English a few time zones to the East, my birth would have been on the 29th already in my present time zone, and then, well, I just don’t know. In such cases, maybe I’d have to wait a day and celebrate on the 29th. Or maybe I just wouldn’t get a birthday that year.

What do you think?

32 Kg.

I thought this blog needed at least one post since I’ve linked lots of people to it already.

And so, with T-minus 12 hours to lift-off, I will break down my packing dilemna as an equation:
snowboard + snowboarding gear + backpacking gear + street clothes + hella warm clothes + work clothes + gadgetry + books + toiletries <= 32 kg I've got like 3 kg left and I haven't packed the last three of those categories... looks like there will be some careful consideration of just what exactly I don't need. Like toothpaste; I hear kim-chee is like natural flouride.

Tuesday, November 04, 2003

GUEST ENTRY by Shalini Vimal:

He [David] later took me out to the most incredible chocolate cake because he knew about my intense craving for real chocolate and lack of its presence in my bloodstream therefore only exacerbating my homesickness. The cake was called “chocolate excess”, what an oxymoron, yet nonetheless exactly what I needed—a rich moist cake with chocolate mousse and fudge strategically interspersed between the spongy layers creating the most decadent slice of heaven that was then melted enough so that the chocolate was oozing off exploding and encapsuling my tastebuds in the most satisfying way. As the perfect contrast lay two scoops of cold creamy vanilla ice cream on either end that intensified both the richness of chocolate and and the creamyness of the vanilla—back to my theory about extreme juxtapositions of objects resulting in intensification of both extremes….