Wii Are Getting Fitter

Posted on Monday, 13th April, 2009 by ianmacd

Our Wii Fit congratulated me today on five weeks of uninterrupted daily use. It could have been longer, but our holiday in Tenerife threw a spanner in the works.

With nearly forty hours of time racked up on the balance board, I still have a lot of fun working out on the Wii Fit. A couple of other titles, bought at the same time as our Wii, are still sitting on the shelf in their cellophane. That says enough, I think. The Wii Fit disc resides on a near-permanent basis in the Wii’s slot.

Although I can’t claim to have lost much weight by playing them, the balance games are still my favourite. I have achieved four star scores at all except Zazen, Ski Jump and Snowboard Slalom, at which I’m still pretty average. Football Heading, Ski Slalom, Table Tilt, Tightrope Tension, Balance Bubble and Penguin Slide, on the other hand, are much more my cup of tea.

Of those that offer advanced play modes, I have achieved four star scores there, too, except for Ski Slalom, at which I’ve so far only managed three stars in the more difficult setting. Heading, on the other hand, boasts a top ten score chart containing nothing but my perfect (655) scores. It took me quite a while to work up to that and I got plenty of criticism from Sarah for spending too much time on it.

Next favourite are the aerobics, of which the Super Hula Hoop, Rhythm Boxing and Step Plus are my activities of choice. I frequently also do the Jogging, although I enjoy it much less (and we have the much superior cross-trainer, if I really want a decent running session).

Getting four stars at the boxing is tough and I’ve only managed it once, even in basic mode. In advanced mode, I can’t even remember the moves it tells me to do, so it’s a bit of a non-starter, really.

I was useless at the Step games when I started, but am much improved now. I’ve managed to get within a couple of points of the maximum score, but a perfect routine still eludes me. Of course, it’s ultimately not about the score one achieves, but the exercise itself.

Less appealing to me are the muscle and yoga routines. Some of them are very hard for one who’s not very limber. Others are just really knackering; which is the point, I know, but since my main goal is to lose weight, I’m better off with a longer aerobics session. I’m lucky if I can score two stars on most of the yoga and muscle activities.

It has to be taken with a pinch of salt, but my Wii Fit age is usually a good few years younger than my actual age when I take my daily body test. Once or twice, it even told me I had the body of someone in their late twenties, although I’m sure it must have been a very fat young man, whoever it had in mind.

All in all, the Wii Fit is a terrific piece of software and very reasonably priced, when you consider that it’s supplied with the balance board. The Wii Fit was virtually unobtainable in most of Europe until a couple of months ago. Every time a few units came in, they were sold within minutes, so we had to be very patient before we finally managed to get hold of one. Nintendo has quite a hit on its hands.

Sarah, on the other hand, doesn’t like the balance games and prefers the yoga and muscle exercises. As you might imagine, she’s also a lot better at them than I am. Where our tastes meet is with the aerobic activities, which we both like to do.

The Wii Fit has garnered some criticism in certain quarters as not being a serious tool for anyone trying to get fit. It’s also said that almost no-one still uses it after the first month.

In the case of our family, that’s clearly not the case. Sarah and I still use it daily and enjoy doing so. Even Eloïse manages at least a body test on most days. If used with discipline on a daily basis, it can absolutely lead towards becoming fitter. As for those who don’t stick with it, you can’t blame the product for that. You may as well write off every diet that’s ever been devised, too, because there will always be people who abandon those after a few weeks, too.

If I have any criticism of the product at all, it’s that you can’t skip certain text screens when logging in for a new session. Some of the dialogue gets very repetitive when you use the system on a daily basis. It’s a minor quibble, though, with an otherwise excellent product.

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Too Good For Facebook

Posted on Friday, 10th April, 2009 by ianmacd

Am I the only person left alive who’s not on Facebook? I know I’m not, but I sometimes feel as if I am.

You see, I’m too good for Facebook. It’s beneath me. Honestly, it is. It sounds like something I’d say in jest, but my tongue is nowhere near my cheek as I write this.

If there’s one site out there that I think is massively overrated, it’s Facebook.

Facebook trivialises human relationships and reduces them to single sentence status soundbites. It’s a place of congregation for the bored, the unimaginative and the irretrievably nosy. What counts as a friend in the patois of Facebook disparages the very concept whose name it so blithely employs. I suppose the word acquaintances just doesn’t have the same ring in a product manager’s ears.

So, it was with some amusement that I received an e-mail from a headhunter at Facebook, looking to recruit me to work there. I wouldn’t be the first ex-Googler to make the leap; far from it, in fact.

The days when I’d work for a company whose product I didn’t believe in are many years behind me now, so it’s an offer I won’t be pursuing. It was amusing to be approached for this particular firm, however, because I actually get very few job offers these days. Of all the firms that could have approached me, there can’t be many less likely candidates.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit to having a deactivated Facebook account. I created the account some time ago with the specific purpose of reading something written by a relative. When I logged in and discovered that I would first have to formally ask that person to be my friend, I lost interest and immediately deactivated my account. After all, we were already friends.

Now, by now, some of you are probably thinking, ‘Jesus, this idiot just doesn’t get it.’ To you, I pose the following question: Think of all the people you had lost touch with during the course of your life and have now rediscovered, thanks to Facebook. Why do you think you lost touch with them in the first place?

Ponder that for a while as you update your status message with the details of your latest bowel movement and the kind of mood it has left you in.

Of course, I ask the above as someone with almost no friends in the real world, so draw your own conclusions.

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They Ain’t Heavy

Posted on Friday, 10th April, 2009 by ianmacd

A week ago today, two of my three half-brothers arrived at Schiphol from Ireland. It should have been all three of them, but Ronan, the oldest, fell ill a few days before he was due to fly and was hospitalised. I thought Shane and Jason were playing a belated April Fool’s joke on me, but I quickly realised that Ronan really wasn’t waiting in the wings.

Over the initial disappointment, we piled into the car and headed for home.

It was the first trip for my brothers since they and I discovered the other party’s existence a year ago. In fact, the anniversary of that discovery fell during their stay.

Although I’d met them in Ireland last year, they were working by day and out with their girlfriends in the evening, so this trip to Amsterdam represented the first proper opportunity for us all to get to know one another.

I still can’t believe how fortuitously everything has turned out. I mean, it’s one thing to find long-lost relatives, but it’s quite another to actually like them. We grew up in different decades, with different families, in different cultures. We could so easily have turned out to not especially care for each other’s company. To my relief — and I think to theirs, as well — it hasn’t turned out that way at all. We actually like each other.

Apart from a lot of chin-wagging about this, that and the other, the boys (as their father calls them: I have taken to the same habit) found some time for a few tourist pursuits, including the all but obligatory visit to the red light district.

And then, in the twinkling of an eye, it was Monday and they had left again.

Eloïse and Lucas love their uncles and the feeling appears to be mutual. In that regard, it’s nice that I’m having my children rather later in life than a lot of people, because it means that their uncles and grandfather can still play an active role in their life, even though they, in their capacity of brothers and father, have been absent from most of my own. My children therefore don’t have to miss out on that side of their family.

Anyway, the stage is now set for enjoyable visits on either side of the Irish Sea, without any sense of family obligation being required to make such a visit actually happen.

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TV Room Project Completed

Posted on Saturday, 28th March, 2009 by ianmacd

My project to get the TV room upstairs furnished and made into a really fun place to hang out is now officially — in the sense that I am officiating — complete.

The final piece in the equipment puzzle was the replacement of our Rotel RSX-1550 AV receiver with a Sony STR-DA5400ES.

In the time we had the RSX-1550, we were plagued by problems:

  • No image over HDMI from our Sony BDP-S550 Blu-ray player.

  • Discoloured, yellow image from Nintendo Wii connected over component cables.

  • Discoloured, yellow image from the RSX-1550’s own configuration menu.

  • Inability to conbine component video input with analogue audio input (needed for our Nintendo Wii).

  • Clipping of the beginning of songs played over the Sonos, due to a slow relay that switched state when detecting the presence or absence of a signal.

In short, it wasn’t very good at audio or video. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of anything about it that I liked. Even the remote-control was awful. An AV receiver that can do neither A nor V isn’t much use, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The Sony, on the other hand, which arrived shortly before our departure to Tenerife, is a breath of fresh air. Everything just works as it’s supposed to and configuring the system is a breeze. Both the video and audio from it are excellent.

In particular, the Faroudja DCDi chip’s upscaling algorithms, used to transform lower resolution images, are very effective. DVDs look very crisp,a although some pixelation is obvious on still menus, and even our Nintendo Wii looks decent at 1080p.

We’re finally able to watch Blu-rays with a DTS-HD or Dolby True HD soundtrack, although our surround sound system is only 5.1, not 7.1. Nevertheless, the sound is fantastic.

The final piece in the project was the construction of a wooden panel to be placed vertically along the underside of the equipment cabinet. This deftly hides the tangle of cables on the other side, as it screens the area from the bottom of the TV cabinet to the floor, along the entire length of the cabinet. It’s attached with magnets, so it can be easily removed and is white, so it looks as if it’s part of the cabinet itself.

Polectro, the shop we’ve been dealing with, have been very good. There have been problems along the way, but the people we’ve been working with have never shied away from dealing with them and have always been tolerant of me when I (rightfully) barked at them for something that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.

It goes without saying that any shop should provide good service, but it goes equally without saying that one can’t simply operate on the assumption that that’s how it will be in practice.

Polectro, to their credit, didn’t just deliver and install the equipment, but were prepared, when necessary, to modify it. This was the case when I wanted wireless KEF iQ50 loudspeakers without visible radio receiver units in the bedroom. They also arranged the manufacture of the aforementioned wooden panel, resoldered Eloïse’s broken lantern (much to her delight) and even helped me fix the dodgy power-supply of my MythTV PC.

In short, I’m happy to recommend Polectro if you’re in the area of Amsterdam and are looking for a partner for an AV project.

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Man Vs. Water

Posted on Saturday, 28th March, 2009 by ianmacd

It’s been another of those weeks. What am I talking about? So far, it’s been one of those lives.

Needless to say, we’ve been busy with the house, diagnosing problems and instituting repairs.

The source of the recurring brown stains on our dining-room ceiling would now appear to be a leaking towel radiator in our bathroom. This was repaired yesterday, but I don’t dare have the ceiling repainted until we’ve been away on another holiday and returned to a ceiling that hasn’t acquired further stains.

Just in case the radiator’s not to blame, I’ve had our shower cabinet resealed with new, er… my dictionary tells me the word is lute, but I’ve never heard of it. A lute, to me, is a musical instrument.

Anyway, the grout in the shower cabinet was showing its age and cracks and tears were appearing in the corners, along the edges and wherever a join had been made. Apparently, the previous owner’s wife didn’t want any silicone-based sealant to be used in there for aesthetic reasons. Sigh.

Whether or not it was the cause of the current leak, sooner or later those cracks and tears would have presented problems of their own, so it’s good that they have been tackled.

At the beginning of the week, I was dismayed to come down in the morning and read an e-mail from Sarah that yet another leak in the conservatory had sprung during the night. We had recently had the conservatory glass resealed and, in so doing, had thought to have tackled the last of this particular kind of leak. Alas.

Yesterday, another possible cause of recurring leaks in the conservatory was identified and dealt with. It remains to be seen whether we’ve managed to nail it this time.

As if that weren’t enough for one week, yesterday finally saw the replacement of the largest window in our bathroom. The vacuum between the two separate panes of glass had been compromised, which caused massive condensation across the inside. Whilst this had no structural disadvantage, it wasn’t very pleasing to the eye, so we decided to replace it.

The window in question is constructed from thick, bulletproof glass and weighs 350 kg, so replacing it was not as simple as you might think. The factory that produced it needed no fewer than three attempts at manufacturing a replacement before they had one that passed through quality control. The previous two had dust motes between the panes.

Given the weight of the glass, it couldn’t just be lifted into place, either. A crane had to be hired to hoist the glass over the garden and onto the balcony, where it could be nudged and edged into place.

I don’t mind telling you that a certain amount of anticipation — no, anxiety — no, dread — preceded the day of the event.

With nerves aplenty and inquisitive neighbours observing the proceedings from behind their own glazing, I took photos as the glass guillotine of the old window was precarious manoeuvred from the balcony onto the back of the crane.

My jitteriness was largely unwarranted, it appears, because the new window was placed with nary a hitch. There was minimal damage to the window frame and, because I’d anticipated the need to repaint afterwards anyway, what damage there was will be effectively erased by a new paint job.

The cause of the moisture that had penetrated the old window’s seal became apparent as soon as it had been removed. The underlying sill was soaked in water, which the old sealant had let through and the narrow gutter atop the sill had failed to disperse.

To prevent the problem from reoccurring with the new glass, it was decided to drill holes through the sill to the outside. The exit point of these holes was given a lick of primer, but I’ll have to have them painted pretty soon to prevent the wood of the sill from rotting.

It took five men, including the crane operator, four hours to fit the new window, which included some time spent figuring out how to position the crane next to our garden wall, such that the window could be swung at an angle suitable for the men on the balcony to catch it and manoeuvre it into place. That was actually a large part of the work. When the previous window had been fitted, a similar crane had been used, but at that time, the garden wall didn’t yet exist, so the crane could get closer.

That’s enough maintenance for one week.

And in case you’re wondering why we need bulletproof glass, it’s because I like to stand at the window, giving passing motorists the finger all day long.

No, actually, it’s because our existing windows on the first and ground floors are bulletproof. This glass has a green tint when viewed from the outside, so to replace the bathroom window with normal glass would have resulted in a window that looked quite out of keeping with the rest. We therefore decided to bite the bullet of bulletproof glass. A normal window would have been much cheaper and weighed a lot less, so a crane wouldn’t have been necessary to install it. I just hope no further windows develop the same defect.

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