Coming up on a week of runny/stuffy nose, post-nasal drip, watery eyes, sporadically itchy ears, mild chest congestion that threatened to turn into a cough Sunday into Monday and then receded. Dehydrated, I can feel and see it in my skin tone. Not sure what to make of it all, because pollen counts aren't drastic, but maybe it's the kind of pollen that's the problem, or maybe there's a mold spore factor.

Push-ups are unreasonably difficult, because my wrists are weak. I see my build type as mesomorph leaning to the ectomorph side of the spectrum, but I do have the classic ectomorph skinny wrists. There are exercises for that, the simplest of which is the dumbbell wrist curl. Dumbbells open up a whole new domain of other upper-body exercises as well, so I'd been considering getting a pair for a while. I love love love the concept of "speed adjustable" dumbbells, but for the price, I decided to just go with ... (...more)

Late last week and through the weekend I had a borderline scratchy throat, but I couldn't tell for sure if it was allergies or a looming cold or just an odball thing from an exceptional night of snoring. Yesterday it peaked and I was almost sure I was coming down with a cold. God bless prescient 2011 me for stocking some beef boullion, and March 2012 me for pulling that part of my kitchen kit out of storage, because a) drinking cold drinks on a sore throat is contraindicated and b) guzzling coffee all day ... (...more)

If you Google "recaptcha", the second suggested search-term expansion is "recaptcha cracked". This mainly leads to a fluffy article that pits one field expert's assertion that reCAPTCHA can be cracked, against Google's rebuttal that the crack demo is based on an outdated implementation of reCAPTCHA. This, dated January 2011, and some mid-year buzz from a handful of vBulletin operators saying they're suddenly getting a lot of successful spambot registrations through their reCAPTCHA wall - so either they wer... (...more)

Session 98, part 1: 3 passes on the Cybex circuit just to get back in the swing. My last weight-lifting session was Tue of last week, and I'd described even that session as "suboptimal", so my expectations were low and I wasn't out to make it hurt anyway. arm curl: 10-12x 30# chest press: 12x 90# ab crunch: 12-16x 90# arm extension: 12x 50# row: 10-12x 70# / rear delt 10-12x 30# (3 alternating subsets on 2nd pass) leg curl: 12x 70# leg press: 12x 230# After some clienttiemz, I returned for a run.... (...more)