Fine Lines Studios

Those interested in permanent makeup in San Diego should check out Fine Lines Studios!  My friend Karey runs it and she does a fantastic job! :)

Super Wok Pacific Beach, San Diego Chinese Food Take Out

I just wanted to give a shout out to my favorite chinese restaurant in Pacific Beach! Check out the new website for Super Wok!

Web Listings, Inc. is a SCAM

These things really piss me off: I just got a letter in the mail that looks identical to an invoice from "Web Listings, Inc." It is actually a solicitation to try to get me to transfer a domain to them. Transferring a domain should cost around $10, but they are charging $85.

You can tear off the little bottom portion, fill in the "Amount Paid" and return it in their envelope (not pre-paid, unfortunately) to "pay your bill. There is ONE LINE (which I'm sure they need to include to be barely in compliance with the law) that says "This is not a bill...", but they obviously exist solely on misinformed, busy people who don't understand domain names and think this is a real invoice from a generic sounding company they have done business with before.

Transferring a domain to them is a TERRIBLE idea. If you're reading this and you've already paid, do NOT go through with the registration. Keep your domain with a reputable registrar or you'll probably be paying $85 every year instead of $10 and I'm sure you'll have a huge headache if you ever try to transfer away.

Anyway, these guys are theives as far as I'm concerned. Hopefully a spam bot is reading this and can e-mail them at: info@web-listings.net

BMI is Bullshit! (BMI of pro athletes)

I was cruising reddit today and saw a comment where a redditor was a bit disappointed that according to his BMI, he was (just barely) classified as "overweight". For those who don't know, BMI stands for Body Mass Index and is a stupid formula that divides your weight by your height squared.

BMI MIGHT have some value when determining the health of a very large population, but for an individual it is totally useless and probably dangerous! To make my point, I replied to the comment that most professional athletes would be considered OBESE according to their BMI. That got me thinking about what a pro athlete's BMI would actually be. Luckily for me, heights and weights of athletes are readily available on their rosters, so I went to work!

I studied the Detroit teams, because they have a team in every major sport and it's my home town!

BMI defines the following categories:

• Underweight = Under 18.5
• Normal weight = 18.5–24.9
• Overweight = 25–29.9
• Obesity = 30 or greater

Overall, there are 115 pro athletes on Detroit rosters. Their total average BMI is 28.3! Yep... the average Detroit pro athlete is overweight and approaching obese!

The number of athletes by category is:

• Underweight: 0 (0.0%)
• Normal: 24 (20.9%)
• Overweight: 64 (55.7%)
• Obese: 27 (23.5%)

The Lions had the highest BMI with an average of 31.2 (Obese) and 49.1% of their team falling in the obese category. Only one player was "normal" (cornerback Chris Houston at 5'11, 178 with a BMI of 24.8) and quarterback Matt Stafford snuck in JUST under obese at 6'2, 232 with a BMI of 29.8. Here's a photo of what an almost-obese person looks like.

Next fattest were the Red Wings at 27.2 (overweight), then the Tigers at 27.0 (overweight) and finally the Pistons got into the normal range just under the wire at 24.6.

At any rate, unless you think that 80% of pro athletes are overweight and need to lose weight, then it's probably time to realize that BMI is total bullshit!

Of course the REASON it's bullshit is that it doesn't take into account musculature, fitness, strength, endurance or any other reasonable measure of health or fitness.

For the same reasons, I think weight is a terrible measure of fitness! Screw the scale.

If you want a better measure of fitness, may I suggest:

• Mile time
• Burpees in 20 minutes
• The mirror (not so easily measurable)

Seriously. Run a mile or do burpees for 20 minutes and see if you can improve THAT number. If you can improve one of those two by 20% the mirror test will improve considerably! Don't obsess over the scale... it just leads to yo-yo dieting and a slowed metabolism. Obsess over your burpees in 20 minutes score and you'll get fit!

Netgear XAV101 Powerline Networking - Syncing or adding a device

I just wrestled with adding a 3rd Netgear XAV101 powerline networking device to my network. The main problem is that the documenation is blatantly wrong. To press the security or factory reset buttons, you do NOT hold them down. You just click them once. I kept getting stuck in the stage with two green lights on (first and third) implying the device was not paired correctly.

The steps I followed to get everything working with a custom private key:

1. Go to each unit in your network and click the "factory reset" button once.
2. Once everything is reset go to device #1 and press the "security" button once, then go to device #2 and press the security button once.
3. Wait two minutes. (I think you have to pair 2 devices before you can add a third)
4. To add the 3rd (or 4th or 5th) device. Click the "factory reset" button (why not?) and wait a few seconds.
5. Press the security button on device #3, then press the security button on device #2. That should pair #3 to the first two.

The Netgear documentation says you need to hold these buttons down for two or 10 seconds. When we did that, it seemed to make sure that nothing happened whatsoever!

TempGetStateItemExclusive3 called repeatedly - SQL Server requests timing out from ASP.NET

UPDATE 1/28/10: Ok, so the solution I provide below, isn't actually the fix. The SQL Agent being off was actually a side-effect of restarting the SQL Server. Turning it back on certainly helped things, but we still have seen this blocking issue since this fix was in. I currently have a question into stack overflow about this.

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I just spent the last couple days trying to track down an issue with SQL performance where there seemed to be a blocking or hanging issue causing SQL requests to timeout. Doing a profiler trace, I found a stored procedure called TempGetStateItemExclusive3 (TempGetStateItemExclusive in older versions) getting called over and over seemingly grinding the server to a halt.

It turns out, the issue was with the ASP.NET Session State stored in SQL Server. Lots of internet searches didn't turn up much. There is an old bug in .NET 1.0 that had to do with serialization of objects. I also found a promising looking hot fix that seems to address this exact issue (but it wasn't our solution).

Our problem ended up being that the ASPStateTempSessions table (stored in either tempdb or ASPState) was growing out of control because no old sessions were ever deleted. Looking up session data then became uber-slow causing ASP.NET to timeout waiting for the session (at which point it tries again, amplifying the problem). You can check how many active session rows you have by doing a simple query like this:

select COUNT(*) from ASPStateTempSessions

The cause for this out of control growth was that our SQL Server Agent was turned of for some reason, so old sessions were never cleaned up.

The fix was to turn the SQL Server Agent back on and make sure the ASPState_Job_DeleteExpiredSessions job is running. We also had to turn on the "SQL Server Agent (MSSQLSERVER)" in the Services section of Windows and make sure the Startup Type is automatic. Our session count is now hovering around 1500 (but I suspect this number would vary vastly based on traffic, the important thing is to make sure it doesn't grow out of control).

Hopefully this helps someone out there, or at least gives you some ideas for ways to track down the problem!

Hyperfit USA Review

I've been working out at Hyperfit USA in Ann Arbor, MI for over a year now and I've been meaning to share my thoughts about it, so here it goes!

First, some background about me

I was always an active kid but certainly no savant at sports, and eventually found my athletic "home" on the track team in high school. I had a successful high school career and continued running in college at the University of Michigan and was a pretty decent college runner. My one remaining claim to fame is that I still hold a U of M school record in the 600m dash (1:17.33 for anyone who knows what a good 600 time is). I also ran 46.8 and 1:49.8 in the 400 and 800. I was actually even ranked 4th in the world in the 600 in 2001 (but admittedly, it's not a world champs event so fewer people run it)

After college

It's a weird time for a lot of people because almost all of the structure that school or college provided evaporates. I wasn't quite good enough to kid myself into thinking I should be training for a post-collegiate track career so my motivation to train at a high level kind of died. There were quite a few years there where I didn't do much of anything, fitness wise. I did still run a bit recreationally, doing a 5k here and there, but nothing serious. I may not have known it, but I was in pretty terrible shape. Here's a picture of me which has to be near my wimpiest:

Getting back into it

One day, I got struck with some inspiration to get into shape. I used to think "in shape" meant the ability to jog a 4:30 mile or run sub 50 in the 400 after being woken up in the middle of the night. But even looking back at college, I wasn't "totally fit", I was just fast at running. So, I bought a weight set on craigslist and started doing bench press in my basement. I was getting back into shape! (Or so I thought)

What's Hyperfit?

Fast forward a couple years, and I had been getting more serious about fitness, working out at a gym at least a few times a week, mixed in with running, hill repeats, etc. I started hearing from a few different friends about this CrossFit thing and my roommate started working out at Hyperfit. Since I had been working out, I think we'd both admit that I was in better shape than him, but after hearing what was going on at Hyperfit I knew he was closing the gap fast, so I had to get in on that. I e-mailed Doug, and set up my first intro session!

Some Reservations

I originally had some reservations about working out at Hyperfit... I wanted to workout like I liked to work out. In my case, that meant focusing on my "glamour" muscles to make my body look as good as possible (and ignoring the "core" and legs, because who cares?). At some point, in my aged wisdom though, I decided that I would just get into incredible shape, then whatever my body looks like would be the way it should look.

Pukey Pukey

The "intro WOD (workout of the day)" is as follows: Row 500 meters, do 40 air squats, 30 situps, 20 pushups, 10 pullups in succession, as fast as you can. I had been working out and was a college athlete, so figured I could blow this workout away. I even cheated a little by training for it before I got there. Well, the workout basically blew me away. I think my time was around 6 minutes and I was JUST shy of puking for about 30 minutes afterwards. THAT sure brought back memories. When I got to the pullups, I was trashed. At the gym, with tons of rest, I could rip of 10 pullups no problem, but after doing all that other stuff I could barely reach up to hold on to the bar. The workout made a mockery of me!

So what makes Hyperfit different?

A lot of things:

• Group based workouts: You can't just show up to the gym and piss around on machines for half an hour then walk out. You show up to scheduled workouts and are forced to work your ass off because everyone else is working their ass off doing the exact same measurable workout and you don't want to look like a pansy. (Not looking like a pansy was my motivation through most of my 10 years of competitive running)
• Total body fitness: Everything at Hyperfit is designed around total fitness. I have yet to do bench press or bicep curls here. (Although my chest and biceps are stronger than they've ever been). Instead more total body complex exercises are performed, like push ups, pullups, olympic lifts, rowing, kettlebell swings, wall balls, rope climbing, running, various barbell and dumbbell exercises and more (if you don't know what those are, don't worry). My "core" is stronger than it's ever been and it gives me a lot of confidence in day to day life and athletic activities!
• Randomization: The workout you do each day is set when you get there and is always (much) different than what you did last time you came. Any fitness expert will tell you one of the keys to improving strength and endurance is to "surprise" your body and your muscles with something different. If you go to the gym and do the same thing every day you're only getting a tiny percent of the benefit out of it that you should be. This doesn't happen at Hyperfit.
• Experts: Personal trainers are expensive. Hyperfit's "group based" workouts offer the best of both worlds. You have expert trainers there who know you by name, teaching you the moves, assigning the workouts and encouraging you to work your ass off, but the cost is shared among all of the members.
• Measurable: While you never do the same workout twice in a row, there are a set of "benchmark" workouts that we do a lot. They're all measurable (usually time, reps or weight based) so you can look at how you're improving over time. Tracking your performance is key to improvement or you end up just not caring and plateauing quickly.
• Photos and Video: Pretty much every workout is photographed and video taped by the trainer running it. It's fun to ego-surf the photos and videos, plus gives you a chance to take a look at your form on the various exercises.
• It's for everybody: When I mention Hyperfit to friends, the most common objection I get is "but that must be for crazy good athletes". No, crazy good athletes are already in great shape, YOU are the one that needs Hyperfit. Everything at hyperfit is scaled. That means stronger members may be doing shoulder presses with 180lbs, but new members can scale the weight down to a PVC pipe if that's where they are at. Everything scales: pushups, pullups, weights, reps, etc. In fact, I highly recommend checking your ego at the door your first few months and going VERY light on the weights or you might end up VERY sore like I did. Hyperfit is certainly embraced by current and former athletes, but I think it's the out-of-shape non-athlete that really needs it, because you get a window into what workout out is REALLY supposed to be like while you get into the shape of your life!
• Results! The bottom line is that the combination of the things above equal results. If you're going to the gym and doing the "elliptical" for 60 minutes while you read a magazine, you're quite literally wasting your time. At Hyperfit, you can do in 5 minutes what 60 minutes of the elliptical can't touch.

Now What?

Now a bit over a year of working out at Hyperfit and I did the "intro wod" the other day in 4:06 blowing through each exercise with zero rest. (taking 30%+ off your time is a lot). Yesterday I did 150 pushups and 150 pullups (5 of each, every minute on the minute for 30 minutes, a workout I couldn't have dreamed of doing a couple years go). I'm also having a lot of fun! It's nice to get out and see people after a long day of staring at a screen. Despite not focusing on my "glamour" muscles, I'm pretty sure my body looks better than it ever has. Here are a couple more recent photos taken at Hyperfit: