Viruses

Last week's technical debacle pretty much fried my nerve ends that had not already previously dis-attached since the bridge going out incident. After my last blog post of 4/20, I was more than ready to settle in for a quiet Easter weekend. Alas, such was not to be the case...

Unfortunately, Dear Child had caught a bug from someone someplace in our township and came down with what will forever be called "that first stomach bug."

Who knew (other than more experienced parents) that a child could throw up once, not eat for three days and then poop enough for five well-fed adults? One simply does not intuit that from childfree life. Nor does one know that one can become best friends with a pediatrician who LOVES to hear your anxious voice at 3:30 am night after night after night...

One learns so many things during a child's "first stomach bug."

I did not know that the banana, rice, apples & toast (BRAT) diet excludes apple juice. It seems that the juice form of the fruit has the opposite effect on human stomachs (natch).

I did not know that Pedialyte comes in yummy flavors and can be made into groovy ice cubes.

So much learning, so little time...but thank God the bug was programmed to run its course in approximately 36 hours, which meant that Dear Child was better for Easter. My nerves sang in jubilation and were ready to catch up and get ahead on a number of projects big and small, when....

My computer came down with its own virus someplace from someone, which will always be known as the "Vista Security 2011 Fiasco." At first, being technically naive, I believed that I need to buy Vista Security to stop getting pop-ups warning me of breaches in my McAfee Firewall.

After days of ignoring, then searching the desktop, then trying to buy the program, I realized as I was reading the terms of purchase that there were typos in the online document. Now, typos we see everywhere, even in this blog, but this was supposedly a Microsoft agreement. There is no way in this universe that Microsoft would ever, and I repeat ever, have a typo in one of their contracts. They're about as anal as I am about contracts. And there are more Microsoft lawyers looking at the same documents before they go live.

So I knew something was afoot.

Upon a quick Google search, I had what I needed: numerous website giving me instructions on how to wipe the virus from my computer. Yet none of them worked.

Finally, I called McAfee and paid the $90 to have them take over my computer and clean it for me. That $90 was money extremely well spent.

Dear Child and computer are both healthy again. My exergaming workouts continue. Weight loss carries on. And now, ten days later, I'm able to catch up and get ahead on projects that are stockpiled. God willing, we'll be free of other such viruses and seriously horrible impediments for quite some time.

Technical Knowledge, Or Lack Thereof

There are many reasons I'm a lawyer. Some of them include always having wanted to be a lawyer; having been an English Literature major in college; and being fairly good at editing and, to a lesser degree, writing. Those are a few of my "pull" reasons. Ie - the positives.

Some of the "push" reasons are being poor at math; frustration at becoming lost in numbers complex calculations; not being able to visualize numbers in my head the way I can with words; and not liking quantum mechanics, even though I've always loved theoretical science and math, and been quite good at both.

So why am I waffling on about this? Well, you may have noticed that the wee picture next to my URL has changed. A month ago, a friend of mine explained that it's called a favicon and that it CAN be altered. As she said, "it's fairly easy." Ahem. Well, a month later, having worked on it (on and off) the entire month, it's finally changed. My favicon may not be the grooviest on the web, but it's mine and it's there. Today, someone I rely on for tech knowledge gave me a link to this site. I'm linking to it, because I've tried following many other directions on other sites and none of them worked - for me.  This one took me about 10 minutes and my personal favicon was up and running.

My difficulty figuring out what technical folks find so easy, and programmers think is so straightforward, also hobbles me when it come to many video games. I simply have a finite amount of time in which I can either play a game or use one to workout. I simply do not have the patience or “buy in” to stop the game I want to play to figure out the simultaneous finger movements to make Lara kill-with-ax-while-flipping-in-air. I’d rather move Lara at a leisurely pace and have her, and myself, think through issues as much as possible. Similarly, I don’t have it in me to blow through my workout time by searching in vain for “easy” information like my The Biggest Loser Challenge calendar, so that I can move backwards and redo a workout or look at an overview of the week to see which days my program wants me to workout. Both of these products would like me, and women like me, to buy more of them. To encourage us to keep coming back, it’s incumbent upon publishers to make games a little more “obvious” and the play “buy in” easier. I’d like my exhaustion to come at the end of my The Biggest Loser Challenge workouts, not before.

Full Disclosure: THQ gave me a copy of The Biggest Loser Challenge to try out and use.

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Food, Glorious Food

Image via Wikipedia Passover Seders; Holy Week food fests. What's a girl to do when she's watching her weight and trying not to watch it skyrocket this week?

Exercise helps somewhat. While travelling to and from family, and spending a lot of time in kitchens and dining rooms in this holiday week, exercising at other times during the day is somewhat limited. But I do count going to the local Italian bakery and walking around while picking up baked goods as exercise. So is one hour a few times a week on the Wii with The Biggest Loser Challenge. So get active in ways that work for you, you don't need to go crazy, just mobile.

Make better choices. The New York Times must have known that publishing "Is Sugar Toxic?" on Palm Sunday, one day before Passover begins, is somewhat ironic. What else do people do this week, other than sit and mill around eating dense food, whether leavened or unleavened? In our household, we read the article and thought, "well, yes, of course; that makes sense; duh; what took them so long to put this out." The theory put forth in the article won't stop us from having a piece of wheatberry pie on Easter, but it will have us keeping our consumption to one instead of two pieces. Everything in moderation, mind you.

Allow yourself to indulge. Ok, seriously, this is Holy Week. For Christians, this is the week where we celebrate the foundation of our faith - Christ's rising from the dead. For those of us with wee ones, it's a bit more about the Easter Bunny and Easter baskets, whether filled with candy or not, but I digress. The point is, it happens once a year. If there would be three times in the (American) year that one goes whole hog, if you will, it'd be this week, Thanksgiving and Christmas. So one can go all out, allow oneself to indulge and pick up the pieces next week. Life is about overall balance, after all. Which leads me to...

Pick yourself up again. Whether you're going to eat a second (or so) piece of wheatberry pie, flourless chocolate cake, or Cadberry cream (CC) egg, it's all ok. Just do it knowingly, balance your other activities this week around your ability to do so (like try to exercise an extra hour for each extra CC egg), and assess next week what you need to do to clean up from this week's bacchanalia.

How are you approaching the holiday food fests?

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Pressure

I often hear song lyrics in my head as I move through life.

Stuck on a train as Checkoslovakia was separating and Georgian mafia were stalking the corridors and taking passports? Simon & Garfunkel's "Homeward Bound" came to mind in a loop.

Travelling through Poland, which seemed perpetually gloomy, surrounded by miners headed to work? Well, of course "You are My Sunshine" should come to light.

Today? Pressure by Billy Joel does not want to vacate my head.

Today is April 17th. One month from this evening, I fly to Boston for the Games for Health conference, where I'll be speaking on a panel. It'll be my first time at the conference, and I'm looking forward to meeting, and meeting up with, tons of people doing exciting things around games, health and fitness.

It'll also be my next big goal - I had hoped to be at least 20 pounds lighter than my original weight by the time I got to the conference. I'm about 15 pounds down now, so have another 5 pounds to go. While I'd like it to be more, I'd be happy with "just" the five.

Can I make it? Will I put on more musckle than the fat I take off? Will I crap out and go on a fig newton binge directly beforehand? Will I be able to exergame in my hotel room? Ah...the mind reels...

Gloomy Day Blues

Today I'm having the gloomy day blues.

After it was eighty and bright yesterday, the rain returned and the temperatures have gone down to the high forties today.  On top of that add an entire family of snotty allergy sufferers, all doped up on Claritin, and it makes for a day when the To Do list looks insurmountable and working out feels, well, blech.

We all get these wish I could stay at home and snuggle into a sweater or bed kind of days. It's easier to do when one is a toddler. One simply needs to rub one’s eyes and say "Seepy" a few times for the parental units catch on and solve the issue. But for us adults, the To Do list calls and we plow forward, while really wanting to fall asleep in our chair.

I wonder what the equivalent is in the Middle East. They don't have overcast or allergy filled days - ever. Sure, it gets hot, but it's dry heat and SUNNY. I wonder if, for folks there, it's the sand storm blues.  But I digress.

Yesterday’s weekly weigh in was relatively satisfying. I hadn’t gained any weight, and I hadn’t lost any either. I’d been a bit freaked out because a mid-week weigh in had shown a ten pound weight spike. But that was inconsistent with all other weigh ins last week, so I’m happy to claim the status quo weight.

It feels like my body isn’t necessarily at a plateau, but rather regrouping before the next series of losses. After working out, and losing weight, steadily for about four months (and fifteen pounds), I think my body deserves the momentary rest to regroup. Lord knows I do. But then, that’s probably the gloomy day blues talking.

I wonder what you all do out there to brighten up on days like today? Do you give in to the ache to sleep, or do you power up with caffeine?

Feel free to email me or comment here. I'd love to try your tricks and report back in a future blog post.

The Biggest Loser Challenge

When I began the Gamers for Health exergaming initiative, my driving force was to use The Biggest Loser (TBL) exergame. I had watched the show in awe, and would sometimes get quite emotional about the physical and emotional hurdles the contestants would conquer. When I was a jock, oh so many years (decades!) ago, I’d had many coaches like Gillian, but my most effective coach had been one whose quiet approach was quite similar to Bob. For those of you who have never watched the show, they are the two main trainers, and there are presently two more who seem to kick ass through kickboxing cross training.

 In the last couple of weeks, I’ve catalogued my nervousness and sense of loss as my months with EA Sports Active 2 (EASA2) came to a close. I really dug that video game. And it dragged me to the edge of my abilities to help me extend my limits. It was my uncomfortable comfort zone, and I loved it.

Last week, I began The Biggest Loser Challenge (TBLC) for Wii. Going into it, I made a couple of mistakes that impacted my workouts. First, I didn’t use my balance board – big mistake. Second, I programmed my profile to give me 40 minute workouts – also a mistake. Again, after EASA2, I was ready for a workout to meet or surpass my current fitness level, and that would pull me to new levels of sweat and pain. These two miscalculations cost me a week of weight loss, but gave me a week of new knowledge. If you’re used to running sprints, changing to a slow job is not gonna push you to further fitness levels.

Yesterday, in a sense of desperation before running screaming back to EASA2, I created a new profile and used the balance board to measure my weight. The simple addition of the balance board opened up a whole new level – a “secret level,” if you will - of the workouts. For some reason, doing pushups on the balance board had sweat dripping off me onto the board, whereas those same pushups on the floor only worked my muscles. The balance board did something to throw the regular pushup into hyper overdrive. It was a whole different animal.  Basically all of the exercises yesterday were like that.

Comparatively, last week I sweat a little bit, but got really concerned that I wasn’t getting a good enough burn. My weight also didn’t seem to be moving anywhere, and instead went up a couple pounds, which broke my one pound a week losing streak and had me a bit freaked out. I’ll discuss this more in another post this week. I was glum, disappointed and told those who asked that I really didn’t want to dismiss TBLC, so I needed to go all out on the workout this week to give it another chance.

Well, the addition of the balance board and the extra time in the workout did the trick. Last week, I’d programmed in 40 minute workouts, which took me about 48 minutes to complete. Yesterday, I programmed in a 50 minute program, which actually took me 1 hour and 9 minutes. It’s an understatement to say that I sweat and had shortness of breath. I SWEAT, was GASPING for breath at many points in the workout and my heart raced. It felt like I sweat out five pounds, which for me is a big compliment.

I look forward to seeing how the workout goes tomorrow, and whether I can complete as many sets with the precision of “a yoga master.” Hopefully there will be a lot of sweat involved. Buy it.

Full Disclosure: THQ gave me a copy of The Biggest Loser Challenge to try out and use.

Spring Springing

With temperatures reliably hitting the mid-sixties, and today even going up to the mid-eighties, one’s mind naturally turns to outside activities. Like our blooming daffodils, pictured above, I want to turn my face up to the sun.

But practicality prevails. Generally I can work out early in the morning, before shifting my attention to work. Right now, with early morning temperatures still in the 30s, my Wii is a much more realistic workout for me. Most other people around here seem to feel the same way, as we see runners jogging by in the weekend afternoons, but no one is on the road on foot as I work out in the workweek mornings.

Video game publishers seem to understand this will to go outside. Both EA Sports Active 2 and The Biggest Loser 2 set a good portion of their workouts outside. It’s as though nature is calling us to be healthy and simply stick with the program.  Unfortunately, the setting doesn’t make the workouts any easier.

In this season of renewal, with green things blossoming and baby animals frolicking, personal rebirth also comes into play. Lent, Passover and Easter all guide us renew ourselves spiritually. I’d argue that it’s also a good time to revitalize our contracts with ourselves to get fit and lose weight.

Running to Catch Up

This past month has been quite a doozy of multi-tasking, with bridges going out, ear infections and other like stuff. The picture that may or may not appear at the beginning of this post? It's part of the To Do list. Thanks Shana for the advice on how to begin posting pics.

So, moving forward, I have a backlog of some topics that people would like answered, many dealing with fitting exergaming into an already packed lifestyle, and some more technical - like how to program a step aerobics class into Wii Fit. I'll be moving through them one at a time, but would also like input from you. Feel free to comment here, or email me, and let me know if there's anything in particular you'd like me to cover regarding fitness, exergaming, life balance, or such like.

Thanks, and it's off to work out with Bob in The Biggest Loser 2 for Wii!

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Parenting Induced Stress

Stress comes in many forms, but one could argue that none is more intense than that brought on by parenting and the real and imagined worries engendered by it.

As noted in an earlier post, The Great Bridge Episode of 2011 (TGBE11) was uncomfortable for me, but created Exodus levels of stress regarding how it could impact my child, especially in a case of potential emergency. We couldn't just walk off the property; and even if we could, quickly getting to a hospital was nearly impossible during TGBE11.

This week has opened my eyes to similar stress arising out of possible illness.

You see, my child rarely gets sick, but is allergy prone, as are both me and Dear Husband (DH); but while I and DH can take medication to deal with the symptoms, my child's doctor had prohibited her taking them due to her young age.

Well, this week, she had teary eyes, running nose, drooling, occasional coughing and what I thought were weird bites. We kept talking to her doctor every day and he said she was okay and simply teething and had regular allergies, and that all of the symptoms arose from those two things. Then at night, when we called night after night with different symptoms, he'd talk us through each one and again say she wasn't communicable, she wasn't sick and that it was just allergies and teething loop back to the beginning.

Then, last night, she was up (as were DH and me) all night for the third night in a row, moaning and screaming in fear and pain. It was scary.

We brought her into his office this morning. Turns out those big bites, they're hives; her seasonal allergies are that intense. She also has a horrible ear infection. Oh, and she is indeed teething. All three things together are the perfect storm of hideous symptoms, impossibility of sleep and "general malaise." Within 30 minutes of taking the prescribed Claritin, her hives began to subside and her teary eyes began to close in comfort. Hopefully the antibiotic will help the ear infection soon as well.

Parenting is hard, and intense, and scary, and immensely rewarding all at the same time. It consumes one's energy as much as one's heart and soul. So while I continue to work out, I also acknowledge that life is larger than just one piece like exergaming, and we all try to piece things together as best we can.

Wii Fit Balance Board & CTA Digital Step Raiser

I’ve been using the Wii balance board (aka step) for the last three months. It was one of my Christmas presents, along with the Wii Fit program, so I started using the step and the program about a month into my Losing Gamer campaign. It was pretty easy to set up, even for me.

In a future post, I’ll discuss my initial thoughts on the Wii Fit program, but this post concentrates on the Wii balance board and CTA Digital’s Wii Fit Balance Board Multi Functional Aerobic Step System.

The balance board itself looks like a short aerobic step. It syncs up with the Wii system and helps track your balance, weight, and accuracy in doing different exercises with various exergames. One would think it’s pretty straight forward, but I’ve had a few issues with the balance board.

First, its weight calibration is off. I thought something was odd the first few times I used it to weigh myself. Then I had the brilliant idea of testing it with some known-weight objects, such as five and twenty-five pound bags of flour. Each time, the scale found the object two pounds heavier than the object’s stated weight. The Wii Fit program allows for clothing weights of two and four pounds, so weighing oneself naked and saying one was wearing two pounds of clothing was a relatively easy fix. A better fix could be for Nintendo to program a nob or other calibration in the program to allow for incorrect weights without a consumer having to use the clothing allowance for that.

Secondly, the center of gravity is off. Wii Fit and other exergaming programs have many uses for one’s gravity – it helps ascertain how fit you are, whether you’re holding yourself up straight, whether you’re doing different exercises correctly, and the list goes on. It seemed odd to me that I was listing a few degrees to the left every single time I was on the balance board – even when I actively leaned waaaaay over to the left, but I really didn’t think much of it other than I must be THAT off balance. You see, as a left-handed person, my left side is my dominant side. I assumed that over time I’d simply shifted my center of balance that far over to the left….but it did seem odd.

Then, one morning I got a call while I was about to stand on the balance board to measure my balance. I had to take the call, so I stood behind the board talking on the phone. To my amazement, the empty board registered my center of gravity as five percent over to the left.  After my call, I tried wiggling the four balance board feet, removing and reattaching them, placing things to one side or the other to see if I could fix the gravity issue. Basically, I couldn’t. To this day, my balance board registers a list to the left and I take that into account and compensate when necessary in order to get the job and workout done.

Finally, the balance board height is annoyingly low. I had assumed it would be the same height as a regular aerobic step, because it’s shaped the same as a step and looks like it’s modeled on a step. But, alas, it’s much shorter. Generally aerobic steps are about four inches higher than the Wii balance board. But certain innovative companies have found a fix for us.

CTA Digital has been around since 1992 and they’re an excellent example of a company that does well making accessories for video games. While they’re not a video game publisher, they “live” in the video game space and they employ many people, helping lift the economy. I’ve discussed companies like CTA Digital quite often with legislators, when violent video game bills come down the pike. Often legislators see video games as “games” and not industries of people employing people to create art as well as accessories for that art. But getting back to their step…

I love it!

It’s really easy to put together. I didn’t even need the instructions to try out the 4” and 6” levels.
It’s stable. The feet of the balance board rest in depressions in the riser so that it stays in place. I did balance exercises for the Wii Fit, EA Sports Active 2, and some self programmed step aerobics classes and it didn’t slide, topple or make me nervous.

It bulked up my work out! I could feel the extra burn of the taller step, and the EA Sports Active 2 heart rate monitor showed a 10-30 beat per minute lift in my heart rate from when I did the same exercises without the riser.

If you’re looking for a fix on the Wii balance board height, CTA Digital’s Wii Fit Balance Board Multi Functional Aerobic Step System is the way to go.

Buy It.


Full Disclosure: CTA Digital gave me their step system to try out and use.

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