The Stanley Cup

So this is a bit of an ad since Discover Card made a series of these, but this one is really fun. The engraving of the Stanley Cup. Whether or not you watch hockey, this is a fun thing to see. It's very short, so have a look.

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Let the shoes do the work

My dear friend Sissy sent me a link to an article in the Boston Herald because she knows I love my Pilates.

Special shoes get grip on workout

As I read it, I was once again dumbfounded by the manner in which people are willing to cut corners with their practice because it makes things "easier".  I wrote back to Sissy via email and in the middle of my paragraph, I realized my comments should be a blog post.  Yes, the post is considerably longer than my email.

I completely understand the problem with sweating and slipping on floors and equipment. And I prefer being able to practice without feeling as if my feet will slide out from under me. However, this bit caused me to stop and gape.

The premise: The shoes provide firm footing, but also guide feet into a perfect stance. It’s what’s known in yoga as "pada bandha,” a foot "lift” that has you press down on all four corners of your feet while lifting your arches and taking the weight off your toes. This pose protects the knees, but it often requires conscious effort to maintain. The shoes, with a padded arch, did the work for me.

And right there she misses the entire point of Pilates.  It's about exercising the body.  The whole body.  Not just the abs or the legs or the arms or some other "more important" bit.  Yes, it takes concentration to achieve decent form and to maintain it from head to foot for the duration of class.  It is supposed to!  

Also, she is throwing yoga terms into the mix. This is something that many people find confusing.  Yoga and Pilates are two different types of practice.  They are compatible with each other, but they are not the same.  It becomes more confusing as people mix the two practices together.  The teachers generally learned each discipline separately and know the differences.  Unfortunately new people in these classes don't know the differences and then come to think it's all the same thing... but I digress...

Protecting yourself from pain or injury is a good thing, wearing special gloves or using padding on bars is helpful and allows you to move as fully as possible.  Having shoes "do the work for you" so you don't have to think about your feet and stance negates a large part of your practice.  Pain prevention allows you to move better, not having to think about a body part allows that body part to be ignored.

Pilates is a mind/body form of exercise. You have to concentrate. Hard. Intently.  But, doing it right will give you the best results for your body.  It's also good  practice for the mind. A major benefit of this, when you concentrate hard on your practice, you can't be thinking about other irritations of the day.  This is a good break for the mind especially on very irritating days. 

If you are finding ways to blow through practice without thinking too hard about it, you are doing your body a huge disservice.  The worth is in thoughtful motion, not motion for motion sake.  At some point in your life, being well acquainted with your body and what it says to you may even come in handy. It can help prevent injury or recognize when you need to see a doctor.

So, take off the shoes, get sticky pads to keep your feet from sliding and start working on mindful motion.

It does a body good.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 08:31 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Hear Ye, Hear Ye

A little news of the day...

Want email privacy? Think about moving to Texas, if they pass the new law...

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Are you ready to drop live tv?

Not until they start giving me options for watching sports easily.

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Think you have a strong password? Think again. While I am all about strong passwords and diligence in creating them, I'm really trying to figure out if there are any passwords that are useful. 

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I need to do some reading on this artist.  This looks very interesting. 

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If you think of it, someone will build it.

We need more and better thinkers!

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We keep hearing (ha) that the cicadas are coming.  So far it's been very quiet here. This may be because they have only hatched as far north as Staten Island. 

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And last of all, this is why I don't read Vanity Fair.  Just sayin'...

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Have a lovely rest of the evening.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 08:25 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Shades of 1995

Today in the mail I received...

A CD along with an invitation to join Juno!!!  All I had to do was:

Load the software on my pc and I could be on the internet in no time!!! 

How exciting is that!!!!!!! 

I don't know how I could resist such an offer. The wonderful world of online can be mine just by loading software on to my pc.  I'm positively giddy with excitement over this, but not sure if I should really give it a try or not. 

Scary exciting this is.  Must think carefully and try to decide if I'm up to venturing into this whole new world. 

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 08:11 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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The Mom Manual

Just in case you've never seen it, here are all the things a mom says in 24 hours condensed to 2 minutes 55 seconds.  Yes, I have said most all of them.  Sometimes even in a 24 hour period.  

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Coming up on Friday

Here are a couple of short ads that are my current favorites because they are so funny.  

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The Eagle Has Landed

This is the most cool thing ever.  

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When the crowd sings

Probably the best rendition of the National Anthem ever. Boston's TD Garden for the Bruin's game. Rene Rancourt, who is generally a bit too over the top for me, does the most incredible thing. He starts the anthem and then lets the 17,000+ crowd finish it. Not a dry eye in the house.

I tried to embed the video, but it doesn't like my blog platform apparently. So hit the link above to go see it.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 10:39 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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The Sad Saga of the Computer

After having a work network meltdown happen at the same time my work computer decided to develop a fatal flaw in the hard drive and completely crash, I finally managed to dig out from under all the mess. Things are back up and running again. Whew.

Being as I am conscientious, I had 2 sets of backup disks for my work computer... for all the good it did me. 

Microsoft can suck it. I tried to restore Windows 7 from my backup disks to a new SSD (that is a Solid State Drive). I wasn't able to clone the old hard drive because of the humongous flaw. I was getting "broken pipe" messages every time I tried. 

How stupid of me to want to get a smaller, significantly faster, hard drive. What was I thinking! Windows believes I should stick with huge, slow hard drives, even if I don't need them. 

GAH! 

Windows won't restore my valid paid for OS to the new drive because it's smaller than the original drive.

Therefore, I installed Ubuntu. I won't go with Windows again unless pushed to it. Ubuntu is working beautifully. 

However, I am still pissed off that I couldn't restore the basic OS to the new drive.  I paid for it!

The bastards.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 08:57 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Frogs

Last night I heard frogs croaking for the first time this season.  Maybe Spring really is here.  We'll see.  There is still snow in my front yard.  Not much but some. 

I'm ready for warm weather.

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This is ultra cool sailing...

Go watch the vid.  Incredible! 

I wish I had seen them when we were out in SF.  Wow!

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Maybe the Hulk is just what they need

Saw this headline on one of my news feeds today...

Republican Bruce Rauner raises $1.3 million for possible Illinois governor bid

And I swear I thought it said "Bruce Banner"...

I'm wearing my contacts so it must be wishful thinking.  The Hulk in politics... oh yeah, that so works for me.

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Odds and Ends

I saw several mentions of Google's Doodle for Easter. Apparently it has sparked much outrage, but caused me to wonder...

Does anyone still use Google?

DuckDuckGo is a far superior and safer way to search the web. I haven't searched with Google in ages. 

Sheesh people - get with the times. Google is so yesterday.

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In very earthshaking news, it seems Justin Beiber has had his monkey seized.  'nuff said.

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Today was national backup day.  I had no idea.  But I suppose I should say, please backup your data. Then again I'd say that anyway.

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And that's about all I have for today. I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter weekend.

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Because you need to laugh

These are the funniest auto-corrects ever. Set down your drinks, grab a kleenex. You will laugh til you cry.

The 30 Most Hilarious Autocorrect Struggles Ever

Happy Friday.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 05:18 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Organic Security

I was reading an article by information security expert Bruce Schneier that has caused a bit of a stir. For a few minutes twitter was hotly debating the merits and at least one podcast was released specifically to address his conclusions.

After reading it, I was more amused than anything else.

"If we security engineers do our job right, users will get their awareness training informally and organically, from their colleagues and friends."

That statement alone is comedic gold.

Yes, there is a lot of very bad security training out there. Yes, computers themselves need to be made far more fail safe than they are currently. But I still giggle at the thought of security tips being passed around organically…

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Spring...

The calendar says it's Spring.  The snow on the ground outside says it's Winter. 

I don't care what the weather wants to do... it will be Spring. 

Because I say so. 

Ha. Like anyone ever listens to me.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 02:07 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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A Few Things

It was an anniversary weekend for my husband and I this last weekend. It was very nice indeed. Hard to believe it's been 34 years...  I can't quite wrap my head around that number.

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I saw this story on the Chicago Tribune

Chicago police officers, hotel doorman help rescue baby

We stay at the Talbott Hotel when we are in Chicago. It's a great place.  I've met the doorman Dwayne Neff. I think I need to give him an extra tip the next time I'm in town.

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There was a google drive outage this morning

It's amusing to see all the wailing and gnashing of teeth by people who expect utter perfection 24/7/365.  Why did they go with google drive in the first place?  Because they know their own systems are subject to failure and it would take far longer than a few hours to get that fixed. 

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Robots that do the chores***

I want one.  Especially if I could get it to cook for me.  Of course if it cleaned the dishes once I was done, that might be an acceptable start.

***minor warning... auto run video at the link - just in case you are somewhere you don't want it speaking out

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That's it for now.  Maybe more later if I find something else fun.

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We're Melting

Yes, the snow... it be melting. 

Ever since the storm last Friday, the daytime temps have been significantly above freezing.  Works for me.

Of course there is still plenty of snow on the ground and the entire meltdown will take some time (unless we get a rain storm).  We'll see how long until the majority of the grass is finally showing.  Right now the amount is zero... still all white with a number of inches to melt.

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Went walking with my regular camera on Sunday.  The problem is, I didn't take a single photo worth my time to do more than glance at and pass on by.  That's pretty sad.  I seem to have lost my touch.  Or whatever kind of touch I had at one time. Oh well.  There is always next weekend.

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And because I had nothing better to do, I joined App.net (which is apparently a less cluttered version of twitter).  Not sure if I like it, not sure if I'll stay.  We'll see.  In the meantime, if you are a member I have a link in the sidebar.

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Here's a cool little website you might enjoy.  Jeff Gamet was talking about this on the British Tech Big Show (which I listened to earlier today).  I may try this out tomorrow and see if it does more than make me want to scream.  We shall see.

Coffitivity: Make your office sound like a coffee shop

Just not sure the clash of coffee cups is what I need.  Hmmm...

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That's it for now.  Time to give my eyes a rest from the computer screen.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 10:55 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Picture this - with a tiny update at the end

I finally managed to make myself fix up my smugmug site where I have lots of my pictures from my "real" cameras (the Nikon DSLRs). 

One of the things that has been bugging me for a while was that I didn't like the way my site looked over there.  But, even with "easy" tools, it's not really easy at all to figure out how to fix things the way I want them.

Luckily I ran across a tutorial (that wasn't there the last time I looked).  Half of it was stuff I knew, but it was the rest that was exactly what I was looking for.  It's the SmugMug Tutorial by Ryan Oakley. 

The only thing he didn't cover was how I could get my "galleries" off the main page.  However, I was able to find a written tutorial in the FAQ covering that little bit. 

It still needs a few little tweaks.  One of them being a banner with some sort of name on it.  So far I'm not coming up with anything I like.  I could stick with my name, but that's kinda boring.  So I'll think a while longer on it. 

The other problem keeping me from using my DSLR instead of my iphone is that I want to change my photo workflow.   I have both Photoshop and Aperture.  I don't do much by way of serious "fixing" of pictures.  Aperture has been good enough since I started taking more pictures, but they have thrown the occasional curve at me that has caused me problems. 

The worst was when they updated their RAW conversion and it completely hosed my existing photos.  Very very irritating and it took a while to get it fixed.  That's about the point I gave up on photos from my good cameras. 

I'm seriously considering moving over to Photoshop and using Adobe Bridge to organize my photos.  But that would be a pretty steep learning curve just to do minor fixes. 

I continue to ponder.  Once I figure it out, I may even start taking pictures with my real camera again.  We'll see.

Update:  Well, I figured out a title and I have it up.  I may change it later... or not.  But now I feel as if I have the site done enough that it isn't unfinished looking. Yay!

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There and Back Again or Travel Makes Good Blog Fodder

Airport observations. There's always something going on...

*****

Unbelievably slow security line. A girl didn't pull out her laptop. An elderly lady with no clue she needed to have liquids out.

Still had time for sandwich.

Some guy getting on the plane. Shedding stuff from his bag as he goes. His wife picks it up then stops in the aisle to give it all back to him. Had to duck out of the way while She slings crap around.  She's having a long winded conversation with him about whether a newspaper is "important" or not.  He claimed it was… alrighty then.  Now that we know, please sit down!

Why do people try to pull wheeled bags down the center airplane aisle? Yeah you flight attendants riding this flight, I'm talking about you. You should know better.  Especially if your bag keeps getting stuck!

Oh joyous day!  There is no one in the middle seat!!!

Two women in front of me with hair styles straight from the Oscars (aka rats nest updos). Wouldn't be surprised if small rodents jumped out of that mess

Bumpy start to flight. Now away from Chicago. I prefer Chicago. Oh well.

Crap. Lost one of my favorite earrings. *sigh* Probably when I took off my scarf to go through security.

Not sure why they serve drinks on this flight. It's so short it's hardly worth it...  Just getting to 10,000 ft is 1/3 of the flight.

Three men at the airport talking about fertility treatments and which local doc does what, how much it costs, and even one doc who does a "money back guarantee" depending on how things go. Wild.

Someone here has a wifi hotspot named"Angry Lawyer".

Ah the joys of winter travel. Before takeoff we needed wing de-icing. Just a precaution. That's okay they can be as cautious as they want. 

Why is it that some flights turn off the overhead lights on takeoff but others don't? This is a  question that wanders through my head as this plane leaves the ground with lights ablaze.

The flight from STL to MDW is 42 minutes. But some guy decided he must put his seat back all the way back just moments after leaving the ground.  I guess he really needs that 30 minutes of reclining. Sheesh. Luckily he is not in front of me. Even luckier, the seat didn't break and land on the person behind him. We were doing the steep climb after take off and he was not a small boy.

The woman next to me was a bit chatty when I sat down. Luckily she is sleeping now.  I'm too tired and it's too early in the day for me to want to talk. ~~ feeling curmudgeonly. 

Would pull out the headphones and listen to an audio book but the flight is too damned short. No point for the 15 min before I'd have to turn it off again.

Should have brought my moleskine notebook.  Didn't want to take up the space in my purse. But I could have put it in my carry-on. At least then I could write during the "no electronics" times. (the things I don't think of...)

I assume one day we'll be able to leave devices on.

Yep already descending. Amazing how fast this flight goes. Now if only I didn't have to get to the airport like 2 hours early, it would be most excellent.

5 youngish guys in suits riding the moving walkway at MDW.  Standing in a row facing the gates. Telling people walking by to slow down. They are not on my flight, thank goodness. I expect they will break out in song mid-flight wherever they are going. Heh.
 
Guy just left the plane carrying something that looked like a pizza warming carrier.

Another guy carrying his skateboard on his back. 

The question remains... Why do people try to roll suitcases down the airplane aisle?

Late leaving. Waiting for passengers from connecting flights. Must be nice. I've never had a flight wait for me.

*****

And arrived back home with no real problems.  Wonder how that happened.

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 12:36 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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