From the monthly archives:

March 2009

Busy couple of weeks coming

by elizabeth on March 16, 2009

SXSW is in town which means crowds and craziness everywhere… but also a lot of cool things to do. A number of folks from my virtual workplace are here in person and it’s too rare that we get to meet each other in person. (Last I saw most of this group was last SXSW!) I’m not personally doing SXSW for business this year (the MMO-related content just isn’t there), so I’m just hanging back and enjoying all of the benefits of an event (hanging out with cool bloggers) without any of the hard work. So far, I like this arrangement.

I caught Jonathon Coulton in town at Antone’s last night (like so many others, he’s in town for SXSW Interactive), and it was a great show despite the fact that I now cannot get several songs unstuck from my head. As has been pointed out to me, there are worse complaints I might have. I don’t have a badge for Interactive, Film, or Music this year, but I do have a film pass which will let me in to as many movies as I can manage, so I’ll probably be catching a bunch of films this week. (I understand that matinees and late-week showings are less crowded, so that’s what I’m aiming for. Though it’s starting to look like work isn’t going to let me catch many matinees — I missed one I wanted to try to see this morning.) Tonight I’m going to see if I can get into Lesbian Vampire Killers at Alamo South at midnight. Because, well, with a title like that (and featuring Paul McGann), I can’t see how things could possibly fail to entertain. If it’s too crowded, well, there’s another showing on Wednesday!

Next week, of course, is GDC in San Francisco. I’ll flying out early (very early) next Monday morning and will be out of town until the following Monday. (I’m staying the weekend after in the hopes of seeing parts of San Francisco other than those between the hotel and the convention center, like I did last year.) Some people I talk to about this still seem to be under the impression that travelling around the country to video game conventions is glamorous and exciting — and while it can be exciting, there are only so many trips through airport security, delayed flights, and lost luggage you can go through before the idea of travel stops being glamorous. (At last year’s GDC I didn’t grok why Chris and Barb told us not to check any bags — after all, we were going to be out of town for a whole week! Don’t you have to check a bag for that long?  But this year I’m going carry-on only myself — many fewer hassles.) And since no one seems to catch on to this, conventions are also a lot of work. We’re taking a much smaller team than we had last year and our schedule is completely packed. It’s nothing impossible, but I’m not sure how much time we’ll have to stop and breathe during the week. Hopefully having a weekend to myself after will be enough unwinding to get back to the swing of things afterwards…!

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Wii Fit and me

by elizabeth on March 7, 2009

My Aunt found me a Wii Fit for Christmas only a bit after Christmas time. It sat snug in its box, in my living room, for well over a month before I made the time to unpack it and figure out how to use it. I figured my usual busy schedule, combined with the fact that I do not always have the presence of mind to pull myself away from work to do practical things like eat meals or prevent the dogs from attempting to eat the couch did not bode well for any sort of exercise regime, but the Wii Fit piqued my interest. (And thus made it on to my Christmas list.)

I’ve now been doing some Wii Fit daily for two weeks now — and that, in Elizabeth-time, is a long darned time. It makes it simple to keep excellent records of weight and exercise stats which is something I’ve never really done before, even when I did take the effort to exercise and/or diet. The heart of the thing, however, is its exercises, which it clearly walks you through and then monitors your activity with the balance board and, at times, the Wiimote and nunchuck. It has a decent amount of yoga, which I’m all for, since I used to go to a local yoga studio two or three times  a week. With yoga, the balance board does keep me honest about whether I’m putting my weight in the right place — something I notice a lot with the warrior pose, but I wonder at with downward facing dog (where I’m told I don’t have enough weight on my hands even when it feels like all of my weight is on my hands.) Mostly, I miss the ability to combine multiple exercises into a single routine. As it stands, I need to click one exercise, do it, and then click another to move to the next. With yoga, the sequence you do things in can be important, so it would be nice if there were an easier way to sequence poses.

The worst (or best, depending on how you look at it) part of the Wii Fit, though? It adds an game-like achievement system to fitness and exercise. Way to cash in on my obsessive compulsive need to get the high score, Nintendo!

At two weeks I’m starting to notice that exercises that really wore me out when I first started don’t bother me much any more. (Huh, that’s good, right?) Maybe this exercise thing is okay — not just some insidious torture routine designed by frustrated phys ed teachers.

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