Feb 04

Weight Weight Don’t Tell Me

My outlet lately has become lifting heavy weights.

Why? Because the goal is to fail, and you’re only competing with yourself. No one can tell me what to do or even how to do it. It is a sport of one and I excel only on my own terms.

Or, as has been better said by Henry Rollins.

The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.

I first read that essay in the 1990s sometime. I’d forgotten how good it is and not because I agree with all of it (the idiot’s definition of “good”) but because it succinctly and pithily articulates a worldview. As all good essays do, it unleashes someone’s mind inside yours.

This is also a favorite part because is resonates in a different realm.

I had done something and no one could ever take it away.

Diverging a little here, but that feeling for me didn’t come first from lifting. It came from graduating airborne school. I was grievously sick most of my time there and barely made it. But I fucking did and when I got those silver wings pinned to my chest that was the first time I felt like I’d earned something that no one could ever take from me. I pressed through on guts and sheer will and after that no one could tell me I was weak or unworthy. I knew the truth; those silver wings were still silver.

Feb 04

Bench

New personal record (at least since the 1990s) of 170 pounds on the bench press.

In the army I got up to 250 pounds. Not sure I will get there again, but my current goal is to hit 200 pounds.

Feb 02

320

New personal record of 320 pounds on the deadlift tonight!

The long slow crawl to 400 continues….

Feb 02

Puzzles Upon Puzzles

I have no idea what the problem is in using real footage in disaster movies if it doesn’t show people actually being killed in reality. This is a relatively-new concern and is puzzling to me. There must be thousands of movies that use footage from real disasters in some manner. I can think of 50 or more off the top of my head, and even more TV shows.

I guess this is a novel part of offense culture? Where it’s imagined if something is offensive to anyone, anywhere, it shouldn’t be done? I can’t buy into that or endorse it as literally everything is offensive to someone, somewhere.

Feb 02

Bet the Pharm

I don’t think it’s the solution, of course, but one reason to avoid obesity and to work out is that it greatly decreases your chance of getting diabetes and thus one can forego the highway robbery of the pharmaceutical companies.

The real solution is to nationalize or at least heavily regulate all of this and jail all pharma execs for their crimes, but in the meantime the above is better than nothing.

Feb 01

PA

I’m pretty awesome at this IT shit. I just solved two problems the vendor of the software itself could not solve — with some hacking, a bit of cracking, and then some outright whacking and then a little smacking.

Anyway, that was fun.

Feb 01

Back It Up

I think my proudest moment as an IT person is not some of the large-scale systems I’ve designed or put into production, or data centers I’ve built out, but when a small business I was consulting for was struck by malware and most of their important data was encrypted for ransom. They thought recovery would take weeks, if it were possible at all.

Thanks to my good backups and planning, I had them up and running just the same again in hours. In many other cases they would’ve been sunk, maybe enough to go out of business.

If you do nothing else, please make sure you have good backups. This is probably the single most important part of being in IT and often the most neglected.