I recorded a video last night, after my third workout on the RPM System. I’ve completed a week’s worth of workouts, and I can already feel the program’s effect on my body.
My core muscles have begun to tighten, and my muscle tone is improving. I like the slow burn I get in my muscles after the workouts — not enough to make things painful, but just enough to let me know I’ve done some nice work, and that my body’s getting better.
The interesting thing about the workouts is that they’re easy to under-appreciate, until you begin to do them. You start doing the exercises, and you think it’s a piece of cake, until you get to the second or third run-through (it’s circuit training, remember), and your muscles begin to give up, and you’re drenched in sweat and gasping for air.
I thought I’d post some “before” photos, so I can track my progress accurately. I’ll use these, along with my initial measurements, to see how my body improves as I advance through the workout regimen.
Mitzi and Trixie, our two sister kittens, are about a year old, as I mentioned last week. And they were also recently pregnant. I say “were”, because both of them gave birth to three beautiful kittens each, within the span of a few days, this past week. You can read the details below, or you can watch a video I’ve put together which includes footage of all six kittens, as well as Mitzi’s birth. If you’re not comfortable watching a live animal birth, then please don’t watch past the first segment of the video.
Given that cat pregnancies last about 65 days, I’m guessing they each met their prince charming sometime in early to mid-March. By looking at the kittens, we can tell Mitzi’s tomcat was striped, and Trixie’s tomcat was black. And we pretty much know who they are, since we saw two tomcats matching that description prowling around our garden these past few months.
Trixie’s tomcat resembled Felix, our own boy wonder. He was all black, except for white socks on his paws and a white-tipped tail. Mitzi’s tomcat was a fairly fierce striped tomcat, quite a large and strong fellow. I think Mitzi prefers striped cats, like her. She doesn’t like Felix very much, although he gets along great with Trixie.
Trixie gave birth first, last Sunday night, on May 16th — the night between Saturday and Sunday of last week. She hid in the cellar, where she found a nice, clean box and she managed quite nicely by herself. In the morning, she showed up for food, minus the big belly. We looked for the kittens but didn’t know where they were until she led me to them. What a relief when we found them! We took the box and Trixie and put them in a nice, quiet storage room next to our house, where she could nurse them in peace.
When we checked the kittens, we discovered she’d given birth to two tomcats who resembled their father, and a striped kitten whose color doesn’t match hers or Mitzi’s or her mother’s, so it’s possible that she may have mated with two tomcats — perhaps even Mitzi’s tomcat. Continue reading →
As it turns out, I like the workouts. Of course, I’ve only had one workout so far, but for me, it’s an interesting change to work out without weights. As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve always worked out with weights. I’ve never really dedicated any significant time, on a regular basis, to working out with just my body weight, doing anything else but crunches, pull-ups and push-ups. So my first workout was a revelation of sorts. I discovered I could get sore and work out all sorts of muscle groups using only my body weight, an exercise ball and an exercise band…
… with one caveat: you need a couple more things, without which you can’t do the workouts properly.
You also need a door wedge — something to allow you to anchor the exercise band so you can do band presses and band rows. I didn’t get it, so I had to improvise. Make sure you find one at a sports store, and buy it along with the exercise band. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find it as a set with the exercise band.
Make sure you read through the Equipment PDF, which mentions the door wedge (the general website doesn’t), and also make sure you get an exercise ball that’s the right size for your height. Check the PDF, which has a table listing the various ball sizes for height ranges.
You also need a metronome. If you don’t have one around the house, see if you can pick up an inexpensive one from a music or sports store, or if you have an iPhone or iPod touch, get a metronome app from the App Store. I opted for the second choice, and got an app called Metron, a highly rated metronome app, which costs $1.99. I like it, and it’s got a ton more options than I need for the workouts. The important thing for your metronome is that it needs to be able to go down below 50 BPM, and, just in case you need it, go up to 200 BPM.
The metronome is important, because almost every one of your exercises on the RPM System will have a beat which will dictate how fast or how slow you need to do it. The beat may increase or decrease, depending on the exercise, making it harder to do as you advance. Without a metronome, you won’t be able to keep the proper beat, and you won’t reap the full benefits of your workout regimen.
Another thing I recommend you do before your first workout is to read through the Strength Program Description PDF, which explains how the circuit training works the RPM workouts. It’s really important you do that, or you’ll be looking at your workout schedules like a hen looks at a newspaper, which is how I looked at it the first time…
That’s pretty much it so far. I look forward to the next workout!
If you’d like to try out the RPM System, use this code (553677456) which will get you a free week’s trial.
I made a quick video that shows you why it’s always important to check a SATA drive’s jumper settings. Many of us assume that since we’re dealing with SATA, not PATA/IDE drives, the jumper settings are no longer important. After all, the Master/Slave relationship no longer applies to the SATA model. Not so. The jumper settings on SATA drives control other important drive settings, such as their speed of operation.
Have a look at this Seagate 500GB SATA drive, the one in my video. I assumed (wrong) that it was operating at 3.0 Gb/sec all along. It wasn’t. For over 2 years, I had three of these drives in one of my Drobo units, and I thought I was getting 3.0 Gb/sec from them, when in fact I was only getting 1.5 Gb/sec. That’s because they shipped with a jumper set to limit their speed of operation at 1.5 Gb/sec from the factory, and I didn’t check it before sticking them in my Drobo and forgetting about them.
I can understand why Seagate would want to ship the drives set to 1.5 Gb/sec. After all, some older computers might not be capable of 3.0 Gb/sec, and you’d run into compatibility issues. They assume IT geeks would know what to do, and they’re right, they would, if they’d only bother to look…
Sometimes you’ll need to switch your drive packs (the set of drives that sits in a Drobo) between two Drobos. Or say you’re using two drive packs on the same Drobo. How do you switch the two packs safely, to ensure you lose none of your precious data?
That’s the question I asked myself a couple of days ago, when I found that I needed to interchange the drive packs between my 2nd Generation (FW800) Drobo and my 1st Generation (USB 2.0 Drobo). I’d expected this move for a while, as I hinted to it in a recent post entitled “What’s on your Drobo“. It has to do with my photography workflow, and if you’d like to read through the rationale, you’re welcome to check out that post.
So, what’s involved?
Safely shut down the Drobo(s)
Disconnect power and FW/USB cables
Take out disk pack as a whole from one Drobo
Insert disk pack as a whole into another Drobo (or same Drobo, as the case may be)
Connect FW/USB cables
Connect power cables
Boot up the Drobo(s)
I’ve put together a video demonstration of the process, which you can watch below or on YouTube. This was unrehearsed, and it’s not something I did before, so there was a fair bit of related anxiety. I rely very heavily on my Drobo units for data archival, and I don’t ever want to lose any of my data. Thankfully, everything went smoothly, and things are working great!
The detailed steps involved in the process are listed in two tech notes on the Data Robotics website:
I need to add here that drive packs aren’t interchangeable between all Drobo models. You’ll need to read carefully through that second tech note listed above to make sure you don’t unintentionally corrupt your Drobo volume by putting the pack in an incompatible Drobo device.
If you’re wondering why one ought to bother to switch data packs, the decision needs to be made on a case-by-case basis. In my situation, the alternative would have been a manual copy of the data, which would have taken days, since I work with terabytes. Switching the drive packs took 15-20 minutes altogether (reading through the tech notes, emailing Drobo Support to ask them a question, and actually doing it). The trade-off, if I hadn’t done things correctly, would have been costly and possibly irreversible data loss. Fortunately, things went according to plan!
