Author Archives: Phil Bowermaster

It's a New Phil, Week 70

And..Resume!

As I mentioned last week, this was a rest week for me on the exercise front. I picked a good week for it, as I was in Boston at a conference most of the week and there weren’t many opportunities for exercise, anyhow. The hotel where I was staying had a gym, but it’s being renovated; and I have yet to try out bringing the hammer with me on a trip as checked luggage, but that’s coming.

Meanwhile, I got a couple of encouraging messages along the way. First, we heard from reader Cypherk, who writes:

Keep up the good work. I started the 300 work out after your suggestion and it is working nicely for me although my moves are way low and i need to buy a pull up bar

The discussion of the 300 workout was here, for those who missed it.

Great stuff, Cypherk. I, too, am lacking a pull-up bar — that was the one piece of equipment that kept me going back to the rec center before I started getting serious about the hammer workout. Pull-ups have got to be just about the best upper-body work you can do without weights. Keep us posted on your progress.

I also got a call from Amanda at Dr. Harris’s office. It seems I haven’t made it for a weigh-in in about a month. This mostly has to do with the fact that my traditional weigh-in day was on Friday and I now work in Boulder on Fridays, which is a longish commute from here and I just haven’t been able to squeeze a doctor visit in. On the other hand, it might have something to do with the fact that I could possibly be up a few pounds and I don’t want to know about it.

Which means I definitely need to get back there. Thursday. It’s happening. Stay tuned.

Anyhow, Amanda wasn’t calling to pester me about whether I was avoiding them or gaining weight. She just wanted to let me know that I was missed and that I could come in any day, not just Fridays. Folks, if you’re trying to get healthy, I can’t recommend enough finding a doctor — or other professional — who is truly interested in you as a person and your well being. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but Dr. Harris and his staff are the greatest. It makes all the difference.

It’s a New Phil, Week 70

And..Resume!

As I mentioned last week, this was a rest week for me on the exercise front. I picked a good week for it, as I was in Boston at a conference most of the week and there weren’t many opportunities for exercise, anyhow. The hotel where I was staying had a gym, but it’s being renovated; and I have yet to try out bringing the hammer with me on a trip as checked luggage, but that’s coming.

Meanwhile, I got a couple of encouraging messages along the way. First, we heard from reader Cypherk, who writes:

Keep up the good work. I started the 300 work out after your suggestion and it is working nicely for me although my moves are way low and i need to buy a pull up bar

The discussion of the 300 workout was here, for those who missed it.

Great stuff, Cypherk. I, too, am lacking a pull-up bar — that was the one piece of equipment that kept me going back to the rec center before I started getting serious about the hammer workout. Pull-ups have got to be just about the best upper-body work you can do without weights. Keep us posted on your progress.

I also got a call from Amanda at Dr. Harris’s office. It seems I haven’t made it for a weigh-in in about a month. This mostly has to do with the fact that my traditional weigh-in day was on Friday and I now work in Boulder on Fridays, which is a longish commute from here and I just haven’t been able to squeeze a doctor visit in. On the other hand, it might have something to do with the fact that I could possibly be up a few pounds and I don’t want to know about it.

Which means I definitely need to get back there. Thursday. It’s happening. Stay tuned.

Anyhow, Amanda wasn’t calling to pester me about whether I was avoiding them or gaining weight. She just wanted to let me know that I was missed and that I could come in any day, not just Fridays. Folks, if you’re trying to get healthy, I can’t recommend enough finding a doctor — or other professional — who is truly interested in you as a person and your well being. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but Dr. Harris and his staff are the greatest. It makes all the difference.

Written in Diamond

Via InstaPundit, author Charles Stross has some interesting things to say about the future:

This century we’re going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything. And it’s going to go on, and on. Barring a catastrophic universal collapse of human civilization — which I should note was widely predicted from August 1945 onward, and hasn’t happened yet — we’re going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages. Sixty kilograms will handily sum up the total history of the human species, up to the year 2000. From then on … we still don’t need much storage, in bulk or mass terms. There’s no reason not to massively replicate it and ensure that it survives into the deep future.

And with ubiquitous lifelogs, and the internet, and attempts at providing a unified interface to all interesting information — wikipedia, let’s say — we’re going to give future historians a chance to build an annotated, comprehensive history of the entire human race. Charting the relationships and interactions between everyone who’s ever lived since the dawn of history — or at least, the dawn of the new kind of history that is about to be born this century.

And just imagine all the alternative versions of that story that they’ll be able to model!

It's a New Phil, Week 69

And…Rest

After four consecutive weeks of doing 250, then 260, then 270, then 280 total moves for each exercise, I’m taking a week off. I think I’ll take a week off every four weeks, to allow my body to recover and to lock in what gains I’ve made. At this rate, I will make it to 500 by the end of the year, rather than sometime in November.

It’s a New Phil, Week 69

And…Rest

After four consecutive weeks of doing 250, then 260, then 270, then 280 total moves for each exercise, I’m taking a week off. I think I’ll take a week off every four weeks, to allow my body to recover and to lock in what gains I’ve made. At this rate, I will make it to 500 by the end of the year, rather than sometime in November.

Future of Libraries — One Scenario

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts on the conference, I was particularly intrigued by what Chip Nilges of the Online Computer Library Center had to say. His talk was very interesting on a couple of levels. On the one hand, libraries are more networked and web-enabled than I realized (and apparently becoming more so all the time.) My question to Chip had to do with how individual libraries can drive web traffic to their sites based not on individual pieces of content — everybody has a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls — but on types of content, content that makes a particular library particularly interesting. (This isn’t as big a problem for academic libraries as public libraries. Tools that Chip described such as Google Scholar will drive readers to a particular academic library based on content type.)

My example: I suggested that the Atlantic City Public Library probably has more resources on the Monopoly board game than most — maybe more than any other. If a web browser is looking not for a particular book or article about Monopoly, but rather general information, that library should be one of the top resources that comes up in a Google search. But if you do a Google search on Monopoly, you won’t find that library — at least not anywhere near the top. And Chip admitted that the tools he described don’t allow for that kind of granularity. I think if libraries are going to continue as individual entities — both online and in their bricks-and-mortar edifices — this is going to have to change.

Librarians see themselves as being competitive with services like Google and other search engines because they both claim the same primary value proposition — they both want to be the Gateway to All Knowledge. I think Librarians get to keep that role with the patrons who walk into the library. As Joan Williams pointed out in the conference’s concluding session, librarians can add value to a search by helping to filter through the noise and irrelevance that typically comes up in a web search. That’s great. But Libraries can’t compete on the web as the Gateway to All Knowledge. There are too many of them, and there’s way too much overlap. Individual libraries need to draw traffic based on their individual characteristics. Right now, the only individual characteristic that leads a web search to a particular library is location.

As far as web presence is concerned, these libraries need to grow a personality.

But that’s just the beginning. Working together, I think libraries in general should start working on being the source of information on particular topics. (I realize this cuts against the grain. How can we talk about being the source for a particular topic when we’re the Gateway to All Knowledge?) By running web campaigns on particular topics, libraries can work together to raise their overall profiles on the web. Plus, once those links are there, they tend to persist.

Do a Google Search on Death Sucks and see who comes up. But I don’t think that guy has published anything new on that subject for some time. Still, that blog entry continues to drive traffic to this site.

So maybe libraries should work together this year to promote themselves on the web as particularly good resources for, say, nutritional information; then those links will still be in place and will still be driving people to their websites next year when they promote themselves as sources of information on alternative energy sources.

Another good topic for this kind of promotion — the future. After the conference, I’m starting to think that libraries have a particular role to play in helping to create awareness about the future. Maybe the Gateway to All Knowledge can evolve into the Gateway to the Future.

Where's My Jetpack Flying Car? – Book Review

The moment I caught sight of this slim volume on the impulse tables in the front of my local Border’s, I knew three things and suspected a fourth. I knew that I would have to (one…) buy, (two…) read, and (three…) review it for this blog.

I (four…) suspected that I would be disappointed, one way or another, with what this book would have to say about those long-delayed dream gadgets of my childhood. But any book that cribs its title from the Speculist’s “Seven Questions About the Future”